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  "path": "/2026/05/laptop/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-05T20:25:00.000Z",
  "site": "https://drinkybird.net",
  "tags": [
    "the spec sheet",
    "ClassiCube",
    "Zandronum",
    "Windows System Assessment Tool",
    "FRAPS",
    "WinPE",
    "playing around with BSDs"
  ],
  "textContent": "A few weeks ago I was given an old Dell Latitude E6320 laptop that my mum had for a while. It has an Intel i5-2520M with integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000, and 8GB of RAM. A perfectly fine mid-range laptop for 2011, I imagine. A quick look at the spec sheet shows that this thing is very obviously business-oriented. I think whoever owned it prior upgraded the memory, though I don’t know the exact spec this specific machine originally had.\n\nIt’s not in its best state… but that’s not my fault.\n\nAn interesting tidbit is that it has both a touchpad and pointing stick, and mouse buttons for each. Both of these are kind of awkward to use. The touchpad is not the worst I’ve used, though, but still lightyears behind any MacBook…\n\nThe display is not very good. It’s a 13” 1366x768 display, and the viewing angles leave a lot to be desired. The speakers are completely dogshit, but that’s expected from a 2011 laptop.\n\nIn terms of ports, this thing has a variety: barrel jack power, VGA, mini HDMI, USB, eSATA (never heard of that!), ExpressCard (also never heard of it!), Ethernet, 3.5mm headphone jack, and SD card reader. One of each. That’s right, only a single USB port… There’s also a docking connector on the bottom.\n\nThe laptop’s bottom cover has a few screws, but comes off to reveal its hard drive bay, which has even more awkward screws. This also grants access to the Wi-Fi card, the RAM, and a coin cell CMOS battery that was dead when this came into my hands.\n\nIts battery is 48 Wh and is fairly worn, it runs out pretty quickly, although it seems to otherwise be in good shape. It’s still better than most modern laptop batteries however, since it’s removable! You just flip two switches and out it pops.\n\n## Putting XP on it\n\nThe first thing I noticed when doing a bit of research on it was that it supports Windows XP! Even though it released in 2011, after XP had been succeeded by Vista, which had been succeeded by 7. So naturally, XP was the first thing I installed on it. And immediately I saw how horribly slow the hard drive was. Its original hard drive was replaced due to failure, but it was swapped for another old and slow HDD we had lying around. The performance might be period-accurate for XP, but I decided to swap the drive for a 240 GB SSD I have.\n\nAfter putting the SSD in, I decided to go and install Windows XP x64 Edition. The x64 version can be a bit iffy with driver compatibility, but this laptop is recent enough that everything worked. Dell’s site still has all the drivers for the laptop, so there was no issue in finding them. However, they like to use a wrapper program for their drivers, that merely shows information about the driver and lets you launch the setup. What’s annoying about this launcher is that a lot of the time it’s marked only for compatibility with Vista, and as such XP refuses to launch them. Fortunately, you can literally just open these up in 7-Zip and then extract the actual driver files.\n\nThe Wi-Fi driver did want me to download and install .NET, which is a problem when you need the Wi-Fi driver to get on the internet to download it. Also the graphics control panel crashes without .NET, though there’s not much of interest in there anyway.\n\nExcuse the utterly abymsal photo. I forgot to take a screenshot, and this is all I had…\n\nAfter setting everything up, the first thing I did (after switching to glorious silver XP theme) was running Half-Life 2. Naturally. I have a retail build of the game that I first tried, but for some reason it segfaulted just before reaching the main menu. (It also had the memory bug I had to patch out previously.) But I found a build from 2005 instead, which works fine.\n\nPerformance results are mixed; it’s certainly playable, but very inconsistent. Outdoor scenes can drop to 20-30 fps easily. That was on high settings, but even changing the settings to low didn’t seem to have much effort. The keen eyed may also notice a weird bug where fog on props appears at a closer distance than on brushes.\n\nAnother game from 2004: Doom 3. I didn’t play much of it, but it did not handle this one well. Even in the opening scene, 11 FPS. Not great at all.\n\nSomething more of the laptop’s time… Minecraft Beta. Yeah this is as bad as Doom 3. It’s so bad that even at the lowest settings, with “Max FPS” performance setting, the frame time graph just completely consumes everything. It’s sort of suprising how demanding Minecraft is, but looks can be deceiving I guess. At least this is representative of how many experienced it back in 2011…\n\nFor good measure: ClassiCube. Just on a vanilla singleplayer map, but it runs a lot better than Minecraft Beta, when rendering a lot more blocks. The OpenGL also doesn’t perform too badly, but is worse than the D3D9 build.\n\nI also tried Zandronum. This was a difficult one, since although we try to support XP it tends to break every now and again. None of us test against it and basically nobody actually uses it anymore, so breakages can go unnoticed for a long while. It turns out the beta builds of Zandronum 3.3 depend on some synchronisation functions that were only introduced in Windows Vista. After some research I discovered two sources of these imports: the multithreading support in Zstandard, and the Visual C++ runtime. For some reason, the Visual Studio 2017 Windows XP toolchain has files that link against these Vista functions, meaning the files it compile can’t actually run on XP. I got it to work by building everything using the VS 2015 XP toolchain.\n\nPerformance is not that impressive. It runs about 2x better using the software renderer than it does in OpenGL mode…\n\nOf course you can do things on computers other than play games. For me that’s programming. So naturally I installed Visual Studio 2005.\n\nI tried compiling Omniscient, which is basically the only project I have that uses VS 2005. It was a nightmare to get the source code on the laptop, as the last version of Mercurial I could find that works on XP doesn’t support the repository format that Heptapod serves; I had to dump the repo as a bundle from my desktop and copy that over. Omniscient also uses a bunch of Python scripts that don’t work on the old Python 3 that runs on XP. And after all that was sorted out, for some reason something is broken and the resources aren’t being compiled properly, or they aren’t being linked in, and as a result it crashes at startup trying to access its version information. Oh well.\n\nI did manage to do something though: a quick OpenGL triangle in Java 6 using LWJGL 2. How very 2011. I think I have better memories of doing this stuff on Windows 7 though.\n\nThen I ran out of things to run on XP. It’s surprisingly difficult to get things to work on XP, even when supposedly XP-compatible… So…\n\n## Upgrading\n\nOriginally I tried to upgrade to Vista. It turns out, however, you can’t upgrade from XP x64 Edition to Vista, you need to do a clean reinstall. How annoying. I ended up deciding to jump to Windows 7. The certificate of authority hidden under the battery reveals that this laptop originally came with Windows 7 Professional, so it’s certainly appropriate for this machine, though I ended up going with Ultimate.\n\nCan I take a moment to admire how utterly beautiful Windows 7 is? Why did we ever give Aero up…\n\nFor Vista and 7, Dell provides a `.cab` file with all the drivers for the machine included, so there’s no need to screw around with installers: just extract it and click “Update Driver” on every device in Device Manager. It’s probably actually automatable, but I have no idea how.\n\nOne of the things Vista added that 7 retains is the Windows Experience Index, the ultimate benchmarking and system comparison tool, powered by the Windows System Assessment Tool. (The previous sentence was dripping with sarcasm.) This thing scored a measly 5.8 out of 7.9. Interestingly, it claims it’s limited by its desktop graphics performance? Somehow WinSAT thinks this thing is better at gaming than it is at… rendering Aero?\n\nThis is also the first time that Internet Explorer can connect to websites using TLS 1.2 (aka, every modern website). IE 8 renders my blog well enough, with some slight brokenness (although my site’s very simple, it does use a modern feature here or there.) IE 11 handles it perfectly though. Perhaps ironically, it won’t render this post due to all of the images being encoded using WebP.\n\nAs you might have noticed from the desktop screenshot, I installed some games as well: Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and Plants vs Zombies. Two games I actually own on DVD! Back when you could own PC games on DVD…\n\nRCT3 runs surprisingly well on this laptop. I did some testing and at native resolution I couldn’t get it to go much below 60 FPS. I’m sure it’d drop with more complex parks but it’s promising.\n\nWhen was the last time you used FRAPS?\n\nPvZ ran fine, as you’d expect. It’s a very fun game, and very charming. It had been so many years since I played it!\n\nI have a few other games on DVD. I did also try Far Cry, but I can’t get it to run. I think the DVD version requires some DRM that only works on XP (should’ve tried it earlier, oops), and the Steam version very much requires Steam. I tried Spore, though I used my GOG copy instead of my DVD; it didn’t run great in the first stages, though it’s hard to gather how well it runs as a whole because the game changes a lot throughout the progression. I also have The Sims 3 on DVD as well as a bunch of expansions, though I skipped that due its Origin requirement and insane loading times.\n\nI fiddled around with Visual Studio 2010 and stuff. Honestly it’s just nice to bask in that era of software…\n\nRemember XNA? It was great so Microsoft killed it.\n\n## What next?\n\nThis thing gets hot. I ended up re-applying some thermal paste, replacing the old crusty paste with some spare Arctic MX-4. Unfortunately this thing is an absolute nightmare to work in - replacing said paste requires _taking the machine completely apart_ , and there are _so many screws_ - and I ended up breaking the fan connector. Since it’s such a pain to take apart, I ended up giving up on that. So now I have a passively cooled laptop that idles at 80C and throttles at >95C whenever anything happens. At least it has some fresh goop for doing so.\n\nHere’s a shot of the CPU at least.\n\nI did eventually update the BIOS, as prior it was running Linux and had some issues with randomly freezing under it, likely to do with power management. This wasn’t easier either: the updater is provided as an `.exe` for DOS or Windows, and past a certain version it doesn’t work under DOS, and it doesn’t launch at all under 64-bit Windows. I eventually got it updated by running it from a 32-bit WinPE environment, which did appear to fix the hanging.\n\nTo be honest though, there’s only so much I think of actually doing when I get my hands on old stuff. Its older hardware would make it pretty good for playing around with BSDs though.",
  "title": "Fiddling around with a Dell Latitude E6320",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-05T20:25:00.000Z"
}