Digital Archaeology: Dell Inspiron 6000

2 months ago (Edited)

The Inspiron 6000 was a low to medium-end laptop from Dell. Like many models, it had a variety of configurations. Mine has the following configuration:

CPU: Intel Pentium M 735 @ 1.7 GHz
RAM: 1 GB DDR2-533 (PC2-4300)
Video: ATI Mobility Radeon X300

For more details, check out the reports from CPU-Z, HWiNFO, and HardInfo.

This seems to have been a middle of the road model. The CPU was on the faster side of what would have been available for this model and it is a version with a discrete video card vs. integrated video. However, the screen is the lowest end that was available.

The Pentium M was an excellent CPU for its time. It had the speed of a Pentium 4 but was much more efficient, achieving those speeds at lower power and a reduced clock rate.

When I got this machine, it had 512MB of RAM which I assume is what it probably shipped with. This is a reasonable amount for Windows XP but not if you want to upgrade to a newer version of Windows or Linux. I upgraded it to 1 GB though it can go as high as 2 GB.

The ATI video doesn't offer particularly great performance when it comes to things like games but it is still quite a bit better than using integrated chipset video. It has dedicated video RAM but I'm not entirely sure how much. Different tools in Windows report two different number and I get yet another number in Linux. HWiNFO reports 32MB, ATI drivers report 64MB, and Linux doesn't match either of these.

The hard drive is an 80MB model that is most likely original. I have Windows XP and Linux dual booting on it currently. I have BOINC running in both and despite this being a 32-bit CPU, there are still a few projects that it gets work for including Asteroids@home (1), Einstein@home (1, 2), and World Community Grid. You can also see how it is doing overall on FreeDC (1, 2).