The Glorious Dell Inspiron 8100 / Latitude C810

Released in 2001 as another entry in the 8x00 series of laptops, the Dell Inspiron 8100 really doesn't differ much from its predecessor, the 8000. Both machines are based on the PIII processor, with the only difference between them being that the former is based on the older Coppermine core from 1999, while the latter is based on the then brand-freakin'-spankin' new Tualatin core released in the same year as the machine itself. Coppermine CPUs run hotter, consume more power and aren't as fast as Tualatin ones (max. 1 GHz vs. 1.33 GHz). Besides the motherboard and CPU, all components from these two machines are compatible with each other: RAM, display, daughter cards, GPUs (you read that right), keyboards, optical drives and all plastic parts are interchangable.

It should be noted that the Latitude C810 uses the same components as the Inspiron 8100, but with completely different housings. The other difference between them is the BIOS: you can flash a C810 BIOS to a 8100 to get support for the C/Dock (Dell part number 1Y412 or 01Y412) docking station (and remove the obnoxious splash screen). For docking, some physical modifications have to be made. Since I don't own a C/Dock I haven't tried this yet. A lot more info is available here: Stonent's "Inspiron to Latitude" modification guide

Now that I've outlined the differences between this machine's predecessor and its business variant, it's time for some opinions. And all I can say here is that I really like using it! Seriously: Dell nailed it with this one. The body of the machine is well designed, very elegant and bubbly, with chamfered edges and curved outlines. Not all black, "going to a funeral" style like ThinkPads, and not "I wanna look special" like the Sony Vaios. It's a perfect mix of the two, looking sleek while staying professional at the same time. Not that I have anything against the look of ThinkPads and Vaios, of course ;-)

Starting right off with graphics cards, my plan is to showcase just how modular of a system this truly is. What I mean by this is that the GPU is literally a module. User-replaceable, sitting on a card under the keyboard which is being used as a passive heatsink. Quite an ingenious design, really. As if Dell knew people would love these computers, they didn't make just one graphics card for it: nonono, they had 5 different graphics processors used over the span of 3 years. Nine if you count the workstation (used for CAD stuff) ones. All cross-compatible, mind you. Here's a list, you'll probably need it. Note that it may not be 100% correct about the VRAM size, but I did my best to check for completeness. (Also the Quadro and FireGL GPUs are essentially the same as their GeForce and Radeon variants, only they came with more VRAM as standard and drivers certified for work with CAD software).

The keyboard is outstanding compared to other manufacturers' offerings, and Dell's earlier ones even. It's using custom-designed mechanical switches, resembling more modern scissor ones, while having a much greater travel than them. It really is a dream to type on. There exist two models/revisions: one using "lighter" switches and the other "harder" ones (my own abbreviations). The former are easier to press and very fluid and natural, while the latter generally feel mushy and unresponsive if you don't treat them more like a typewriter. I have both versions, a German (ISO) one and a US (ANSI) one, the German one being harder to press down. Additionally, the German unit was manufactured in Malaysia while the US one comes from Japan, so clearly there's at least two manufacturers that made keyboards for this machine. Still, both of them feel great once you get used to them.

These machines come with 3 mouse input choices: trackpad, TrackPoint and PS/2. Why PS/2? Because some brain dead manufacturers with machines comparable to this one decided not to spend the extra 0.05 cents on a bloody combo PS/2 port on their laptop offerings despite PS/2 still being used frequently at the time they were produced. Looking at you Big Blue. Alas, both the trackpad and TrackPoint are reasonable for what they are: input devices on a laptop from 2001. Both take some time to get used to, even if the same input method was used on another, more modern laptop. The trackpad can be imprecise and jumpy at times without Windows' mouse acceleration feature, which I just so happen to despise and always turn off on a clean install. Additionally, it's simply too small to be used effectively with the high-resolution panel I'm using with this machine. The TrackPoint offers a greatly improved preciseness and DPI, and is much better suited to this machine in general. Still nowhere near a ThinkPad's buttery-smooth TrackPoint, but much more usable than the trackpad.

Note: since writing this I've concluded that not all interference is actually audible on the headphone output. The paragraph below blows things out of proportion. The 2nd one below gives updates with findings about how to "fix" this, or at least make it less apparent. The part about the speakers still stands though.

Probably the only disappointing aspect of this machine have to be its audio capabilities. Using the ESS Maestro 3i, the sound coming from the headphone out sounds, depending on the headphones used but still clearly present on all, very noisy, especially at higher levels. It seems as if the audio components weren't shielded properly, since simply moving the mouse around or opening an Explorer window causes audible interference. And don't even think about silent USB transfers. To add insult to injury, the audio sounds compressed, almost like a 96KBPS MP3 file. At first I thought this might be a software issue, but even after installing different versions of the driver the "compression" is still there. I don't know how anyone at Dell thought this would be considered acceptable sound output, since it sounds like absolute dogshit. Playing music is not this machine's strong point. Oh, and let's not forget about the speakers! They were so badly made, the paper cone inside them has started melting away with age. All you can hear on mine are faint representations of the sound they were meant to make, drowned away by horrendous screeching and clipping. If I had to do any serious audio work on this system, which I will not be doing, I'd consider getting a USB sound device.

Update: I tried out the line-in with Audacity, and after unmuting it and increasing the sound level to maximum it's pretty much perfect. I'm impressed: I expected noisy garbage all-round, but I guess audio may not be out of the question for this thing! (there was a minuscule amount of hissing, but that turned out to be the source's fault: my 3rd generation iPod. I don't have any devices that have a proper line-out, so I had to do with what I had on hand.) What I found interesting was that the audio, played in Audacity, didn't sound compressed. So I dug a bit more in Control Panel, and found a hardware acceleration slider which I somehow missed the previous 3 times I'd tried changing audio settings. Sliding it down to "basic acceleration only", stopping the audio stream in WMP and playing again, aaaaand voila! It sounds perfect! Also the interference isn't nearly as bad as I described above when using higher impedance headphones or even speakers. Even if you are using earbuds it's still plenty good and loud on the first 4-5 levels when pressing Fn+Page Up or Page Down / the volume buttons next to the power button. It's still there on higher levels, but only really audible when nothing's playing, or there's a silent part of a song. Also: interference that comes along with USB transfers isn't heard on headphone out either. All in all, audio work could just be a real possibility with this machine, if using the right headphones and sound settings.

Update 2: the interference that can't be heard on headphones seems to be an issue of the CPU clock speed. For instance, when plugged into the AC adapter, the laptop produces more noise because the CPU is running at full speed, in my case 1000MHz. When on battery power, Windows automatically downclocks to 700MHz for the sake of improved runtime. This behaviour can be changed to always downclocking in the BIOS, even when plugged in, but it's not really a valid solution since you're needlessly losing performance. The solution: install SpeedswitchXP, a program which allows for controlling CPU speed from Windows and setting a CPU load threshold at which point the speed automatically increases. Not only does this avoid the annoying chipping noise, but it also helps keep the system cooler by not running the CPU at full speed unnecessarily.

The same person made I8kfanGUI, another very useful program for controlling the two fans on the back, providing custom temperature curves and thresholds at which point they kick in. The default 70degC at which they start without it is IMO way too high. I personally start them at 60 and let them cool down to 42. When idle, the temperature usually fluctuates between 45-50degC which I think is fairly reasonable. While playing a DVD it mostly stays around 60, and that's not something I can change without the fans sounding like the computer is about to take off to space. Still, ~60degC is well within the operating range of the Tualatin-based Mobile Pentium IIIs so I'm not worried.

The display options are quite interesting. You've got the dreadful 14.1" 1024x768 panel that makes the bezels look disproportionate to the rest of the laptop. From what I can tell, machines with these displays are everything but usual. I could find only a couple on the Bay after months of searching. They're probably using some crappy IBM panel. I say crappy because all IBM panels haven't stood the test of time, with lots of them having lines and artifacting nowadays. Anyhow, only get one of those if you like how odd and ugly they look.
Next, a huge step-up: a 15" 1400x1050 panel. My first unit came with a Samsung one, unfortunately pretty "meh" in regards to colours, adding a bluish tint to everything, but with a really bright backlight. That panel is now used in my ThinkPad A31, since they're both compatible, aside a couple plastic tabs on the back which must be "surgically removed", aka sawed off :-)
The third and most exciting option is the 1600x1200 "UltraSharp" display. Ridiculously high of a resolution at the time, especially for a laptop. My unit is currently fitted with a Sharp panel, who, contrary to the marketing name Dell used, isn't the only manufacturer of these panels. I remember seeing Hitachi and Toshiba panels as well. The one I have is very good at reproducing and distinguishing between colours. Take, for example, standard Windows Classic menus. The separators in them are easily seen, unlike some other panels where you have to squint your eyes to notice them. What isn't nearly as impressive, and a bit disappointing actually, are the viewing angles. Both the vertical and horizontal ones aren't nearly as good as I expected them to be. Now I know this isn't an IPS panel, but still, I expected much more from it. That, and the backlight doesn't get very bright. The 1400x1050 Samsung panel above is better in both regards, but the poor colours when comparing the two really kill it for me. Also I love how many icons you can vertically fit on the desktop on the Sharp! However, an inherent downside of the resolution is that all text is teeny tiny. This can be remedied with increasing the DPI in Windows, but remember, this is Windows 2000/XP scaling we're talking about. As such, fonts look terrible, things that are meant to be symmetrical and centred aren't anymore, and icons don't change their sizes since they're non-scalable bitmaps. Only get this display if you have good natural eyesight, good glasses/contacts or like having GUI elements look like they were designed by a 13 year old web designer from 1999.

I/O is mostly standard for a machine of this period. On the back you get 2 USB 1.1 ports, serial, parallel, the docking connector, VGA out, PS/2 and the 3-pin power connector.
Right hand side, there's 2 32-bit PC Card/PCMCIA slots, and under them are the mic in, headphone out and line in jacks. A useful addition is the IEEE1394/FireWire/i.Link port for transferring footage from camcorders and the like. Next to those are the hard drive bay, Fast Infrared, Kensington lock, and RJ-11 and RJ-45 jacks for the modem and ethernet, which are supplied through a Mini-PCI card accessible from the bottom of the machine.
Left hand side is where the optical drive is. It can be removed with just one screw and replaced with any compatible drive. There's no whitelist, but not all drives have the compatible Master/Slave configuration so replacement may be a bit tricky if you don't have a lot of drives to try out. I use a Toshiba SD-R2102 DVD-R/CD-RW drive I pulled from some HP-consumer-whatever and it works perfectly. Next to it, an S-Video output, a second Kensington lock and a knockout for where the Wi-FI antenna was suppossed to be. (maybe it's still there, but it certainly doesn't have the u.fl connector with it)

For networking we've got both a Lucent WinModem and a 10/100 Intel 8255x-based Ethernet adapter, both on the ActionTec MP100IM combo card that goes in the machine's Mini-PCI slot as I've said before. This slot could also be used with a Wi-Fi card, although I don't believe many buyers opted for this option, since you could only use one of the two cards at the same time, and wireless networking was mostly a thing on airports. I figure there probably were combo Ethernet/Modem/Wi-Fi cards available, but no doubt even the thought of them screamed big money.Of course, PCMCIA/PC Card Wireless cards are very much a thing and likely yield better reception than the machine's internal antenna anyway.

Following up on the aforementioned modularity... *lights fade to 25% as lightly coloured smoke arises from somewhere behind, engulfing and dimming most of the stage: and then, right in its centre, a small, thin, rectangular box appears...*

The one and only... Modular Bay.

Right. Enough with that.
The modular bay is Dell's name for user-replaceable drives. Despite the technology obviously being based around IDE, the drives themselves are hot-swappable, meaning all you need to do is safely eject them from Windows, then unlatch them from the bottom of the machine and pull them out the front. To insert another drive in place of the old one, simply plug it in. No need to go into suspend like all ThinkPads from the same time period. That's modular for ya.

Don't get me wrong, Dell was very much not the first to come up with such an idea. But they were first to support swapping over modules from multiple generations of machines. Five, to be exact. Spanning from the Latitude CP in 1998 all the way to the C840/8200 series of Pentium 4 Latitudes/Inspirons from early-mid 2002 (and their 14 inch cousins) That's almost 5 years of cross compatibility between different laptops. About seven or eight if you take into consideration how modules were sold well into the mid 2000s.

There are a lot of modules you could get. The obligatory CD-ROM, floppy and battery. DVD drives came around 1999, and I'd imagine were sold with PCMCIA MPEG accelerators, one of them being the Margi DVD-To-Go. 2000, and around came CD burners, and a bit later DVD-R/CD-RW combo drives. A year still, and you could have a DVD and CD burner all in one drive. There was the normal 3,5 inch floppy drive, but also an LS-120 and LS-240 drive, and of course Zip 100, 250 and an uncommon Zip 750 module as well. Battery capacities were going up along the years too, with the CP coming with a 3000mAh one and the final ones being 4400mAh, that's nearly 50 % more capacity. Did I mention you could have two of them in at the same time? Well, I did now. And of course, there's also the secondary HDD modular bay.

All in all, lots of options over many years, and practically everything you'd need to use if you were a businessman/professional in any field back then.

And so with this I end my review of the Inspiron 8100. It's truly a great machine. Built well, really fast for the time, amazing panel and keyboard, extremely modular and built with serviceability in mind. I didn't mention this before, but I can take this system apart, replace its motherboard, and be halfway done with the reassembly in roughly 20 minutes. To put it in prespective, my TP A31 takes about 20 minutes just to take the screen assembly off, and there I have to be really careful about where I'm placing the screws since it uses like 6 different kinds, whereas the Dell uses... two. Need I say more about this thing's repairability? Anyway... that's it really! I'll be adding more things to this page if and when I feel like I have something important to share about this machine. I've had it for more than a year and a half now and it's presented me with 0 issues whatsoever in that timeframe, though the one I'm using hasn't really had much of a life before me. If it had been an office typewriter things could've been different. Heck, the keyboard has barely any wear at all!

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