Jump to content

Win7 Ultimate on Dell Latitiude D800


TechKitten 360+

Recommended Posts


2 hours ago, TechKitten 360+ said:

I am upgrading my Dell Latitude D800 from Windows 2000 pro to Windows 7 Ultimate. Any suggestions? It will be on the internet, and might replace my Late-2011 MacBook pro.

It was too d@mn fast :w00t: with 2k and you need to slow it down to a crawl , right? :dubbio:

;)

Seriously, it seems to me like a tad bit too old/underpowered to run Windows 7 :unsure:.

jaclaz


 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Its not a very good idea to install Windows 7 on 2003/2004 laptops lol...
I mean it will still work properly, only issue is that Windows 7 is way too bloated compared to Windows 2000. A Latitude D800 can only support up to 2gb of ram (Which is not very good for Windows 7!). Is your only intention to use the internet?  Windows 7 will work fine if that's the case (If you have at least 1gb of ram). Why not stay with 2000? Its faster, works fine with 1gb ram and with blackwingcat's kernel extension, can run many of the latest web browsers!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have a Dell Latitude D800. It's in pieces at the moment, unfortunately. I do have 2 Latitude D810s, a D610 and a Precision M70, and I can say that they run Windows 7 very well. Almost as well as they run Windows 2000 and XP. Obviously they are old machines, and a Core 2 Duo laptop like the Latitude D820 will have better performance, but you should be able to perform menial tasks with the Pentium M.

Which GPU does your D800 have? Dell offered a few different cards (and they are actual cards). There's an ATi one and an nVidia one that both have WDDM drivers for Vista that should work in 7.

2GB is enough RAM for general use. My concerns are the CPU. If you have one of the very early Banias Pentium Ms (1.3GHz or so) you might not be too impressed with the performance. If you have one of the later Dothan Pentium Ms running at around 1.8GHz, performance should be OK.

Finally I'd recommend an SSD, or at least a hard drive with good random read / write performance. That should make Windows 7 nice and snappy.

I'd recommend buying one of these media bay caddies and using a real SATA SSD: http://www.ebay.com/itm/280681703820 I use one of these with a 120GB Intel SSD in my Latitude D610, and it works very well. Be aware that the Latitude D800 does not support 48bit LBA, so the drive size is limited to 137GB. Windows 2000 SP4 and onwards support 48bit LBA in software, so you can technically use a drive bigger than 137GB, but it's not recommended.

You can also try an mSATA SSD in an mSATA to 2.5" IDE adapter in the main drive bay.

Edited by MrMaguire
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, MrMaguire said:

 Windows 2000 SP4 and onwards support 48bit LBA in software, so you can technically use a drive bigger than 137GB, but it's not recommended.

Not recommended why? :dubbio:

On a Windows NT system if the OS supports 48 bit LBA there is no actual need for the BIOS to support it (of course one needs a "within 28 bit LBA" partition for the OS).

At least it has been used for years by lots of people without any issues AFAIK/AFAICR, though a 120 or 128 GB SSD seems "just right" for the intended usage.

And (just for the record) it should be SP3 onwards :unsure::
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/305098

2 hours ago, MrMaguire said:


 

2GB is enough RAM for general use. My concerns are the CPU.

:) Same as my concerns.

In any case the 2 Gb are not that much for internet usage, it depends, but anyway the 7 should be tweaked to have a low RAM impact by the (mostly useless) standard services.

jaclaz
 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

38 minutes ago, jaclaz said:

Not recommended why? :dubbio:

Well, I had read on the Dell forum that relying on the OS access routines could result in random data corruption. Now you've made me question the validity of that... I have no idea why Dell never added 48bit LBA support to the D800 BIOS. They never added it to the D610 either, but did to the D810 (D610's 15" cousin). It would be nice if somebody could implement the code from the D810 BIOS into the D610 BIOS, and perhaps others.

50 minutes ago, jaclaz said:

In any case the 2 Gb are not that much for internet usage, it depends, but anyway the 7 should be tweaked to have a low RAM impact by the (mostly useless) standard services.

I get along just fine in Windows 7 with 2GB of RAM. Like you said, it depends. I use mostly old software and Pale Moon for my web browser. I've found Chrome and Firefox to be quite CPU intensive on a computer this old. I haven't disabled any services. I feel that it's not entirely necessary to do that.

Just FYI, if anyone is concerned about playing YouTube on a computer this old, Flash Player seems much more optimised than HTML5. A media player called SMPlayer with the SMTube addon works quite nicely for playing higher-res. videos outside of the browser without Flash or HTML5.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, jaclaz said:

Maybe (didn't really check) something *like* that has already been done. Try here :unsure::

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/22076-Latitude-D610-request-fix-for-137GB-BIOS-limit

jaclaz


 

That thread has been hiding from my Google searches! Thanks. I guess that's why they call you "The Finder". :P

I read through the entire thing, and it seems that they did come up with a D610 BIOS with working 48bit LBA. However from what I understand PXE booting from the onboard LAN does not work with that BIOS. A deal breaker since I do use PXE booting. Oh well, I'll just keep using my stock BIOS and SSD.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...