Dell Inspiron 5150: Good for Windows XP Gaming? 

I’m a huge fan of laptops from this era. Not only for nostalgia reasons, since this is what I grew up with, but also since it was a golden age of laptop upgradability. I’ve got a few ThinkPads and Compaqs of the era, and they’re great machines.

In my work and study of vintage computers over the past few years, I have consistently been impressed with Dell’s designs, quality, and continued legacy support. Well done, Dell team!

this might be the first retro computer that i’ve seen on youtube that i actually have. used it a lot when i was a kid and ended up inheriting it from my dad. sure, it’s definitely worse for wear but certainly still usable. remember playing rollercoaster tycoon 3 on it and it handling it pretty damn well.

The Windows XP retro gaming scene is going to be an interesting one, because XP was supported for so long up to Windows 7 and even beyond into 2015. The poor reception of Vista really prolonged it's lifespan. I currently have XP set up on my 2011 Thinkpad T420, one of the last laptop generations to have native support for the OS.

I absolutely love these types of videos. I have many XP era laptops loaded down with games. Also if you want a more modern laptop that's very small, with hours of battery life while playing, I recommend the Dell Latitude 3189. You can get them under $100, they have windows 11, and are on par gaming and benchmark wise with an ATi 9800pro. I put a usb external SSD on that sucker and loaded it down with all my GOG games. It is a great pre 2004 gaming pc( an era that has a lot of nostalgia for me as that was my teens and early adulthood). Great for all those unreal engine 2 games and below. Handles dosbox great too. Resolution of the screen is 1366x768, so a lot of these games will run at 1024x768 or you can use widescreen mods. Also a glide wrapper like DgVoodoo will get those glide games running just great. This little hunk of junk is great for travel, it's light, and you can game on the battery for at least 3 hours. I did it playing Deus Ex and Gothic 2. It's a great option for the retro pc user that needs a little pc for travel that can browse the web safely.

I think you're glossing over what a weird thing the P4 was here, especially crammed into a laptop. The Pentium M chips of that time would have performed similarly if not better, and so it's weird to me how Intel was pushing P4 chips into laptops, creating unnecessary internal competition with a CPU that didn't perform like they intended. P4 chips were an evolutionary dead end. Intel had to go back to the Pentium M, which was based entirely on the Pentium 3, to start making good CPUs again - the Core line we know til this day. It's like Intel was hungover from drinking all that megaherz koolaid in the 90s, gaslighting themselves into believing a 3ghz P4 made sense when a lower clocked Pentium M would've outperformed it and drawn less power doing it. The IBM Thinkpad T42 with Pentium M and Radeon 9600 was a far better machine for gaming, and it should have been for sale around the same time.

I don't know if I'd call anything with an FX 5200 a "lucky find", but I admit there was much worse in the laptop world back then, and even having a discrete GPU in a laptop back then was uncommon. But you were definitely limited to very old games on that card, even by 2003 standards.

ah, what an absolutely miserable machine. P4 laptops were truly the worst of every world: hot, slow, expensive, and left so immediately in the dust by every class of new machine that you wondered why you bothered in the first place. comparing this to my first Vista laptop (an Acer Aspire, lmfao) was night and day even then. the only thing i miss is the keyboard!

I love the music you chose for your videos. I also love the content. Makes me nostalgic of my childhood xp experience.

I had a machine from this family growing up... It feels weird to think of it as retro tech, but at the same time exciting to see coverage of something so niche that also connects with me on a deeply personal level. Thank you for this!

I have a pristine Dell M1710 that I obtained from my work and it's a beast at circa 2007 gaming! It has 32 bit Windows XP SP3.

You should check out the Inspiron 9100, the 5150s big brother with a desktop chip and very similar design language using the same colors and style.

We had a load of these at a company I was working at around 2004/2005. They were not really corporate laptops and so they failure rate was bad, every single one needed a motherboard replacement. I was told they were more of a home machine or gaming machine, more cutting edge specs and more heat as a result.

Don't forget you can plug in a USB hub, keyboard, mouse and VGA monitor still. You then can use any resolution you want for gaming. I think this is an excellent option

This video's definitely a Nostalgia trip for me, thank you for uploading this! I had the 5150 Brand New when I started College, (later on I was also given the 5100, which is a celeron-based processor variant) I'll tell you one thing though, the laptop doesn't age well; repeated RMA's to Dell Tech Support, due to various components failing, (Motherboard, Power Supply, Power Jack, Hard Drive, Battery, etc.) just about everything's failed on the laptop and had to be replaced, even several times! But, as a daily driver for Years, that laptop served me well! (and yes, I did carry the hefty laptop+power supply with me everywhere, it wasn't easy! 😂)

hey colin...great work on everything your show offers...well documented ...well thought out presentation...

I absolutely love your videos!

You are my new favorite techtuber. The amount of tech nostalgia hits me hard in the feels

I have one similar the 9100 Inspiron, but my hinges were super stiff and broke recently, but I still kept all the stuff until I can fix them, love your videos Colin

I never thought you would review my exact same machine! 😅

I bought a Dell Inspiron 5100 about a year ago and did all of the things no one in their right mind would do. I used it for modern day tasks with Windows xp. Even though it was slow more often than not, it still managed to be usable.

I have lived long enough to see XP now considered interesting to retrophiles. I think it's time to check out.

I have a Dell Inspiron 510m which is very similar to the one in the video. I was attracted to the blue and silver color scheme. I originally bought it to use as a retro machine but so far haven't got round to it. For a while I preferred the Dell Latitude D430 as an XP machine as it's smaller and lighter, not to mention more powerful and with a more modern selection of slots and ports.

Haha, loved the ending on this one!

"Dude you're getting a Dell!" Perfect ending!!

I remember I bought a new HP Pavillion desktop PC in 2003. I was really impressed with XP's stability; it just worked. The Win98 SE box it replaced was crash-y, especially with USB devices.

This brings back some memories. The ultimate lap warmer.

I had this exact Laptop back in High School. Used it for a few years.

I still have a fully functional Gateway M500s from the same era. It had a unique (for the era) widescreen and media control setup, with a modestly impressive speaker set with subwoofer built-in. I’m going to dig the machine out and clean it up, maybe drop in solid state storage, but it’s an incredible gaming machine for the era … at least as a portable DOS and even limited console/arcade machine emulation (which is exactly what the machine did when I wasn’t doing work on it). I used to play everything through N64/PlayStation without issue on the mobile Pentium 4. Great stuff!

I came across a number of these Inspirons and in fact had one that had broken barrel charging ports. Don't miss them at all.

Thanks for this glimpse into WinXP gaming laptop era. My personal preference is Toshiba Satellite 5205-705. It’s a Pentium 4 machine with GeForce 5600go, gorgeous 1600x1200 screen and rich Yamaha sound powered by two speakers and subwoofer. The screen is really good even by today standards, and gpu is capable of running most pre-2004 year games. Plus Yamaha chip helps running dos games (under win 98) with general midi music.

This brings back good memories from childhood, my first laptop was a Dell Inspiron 500M.

Have a dedicated core 2 quad 9550 win XP machine. Works like a dream ( build it a couple of years ego ).

My grandma bought me this exact laptop back in 2004-ish. I remember building it on Dell's website which was so cool back then. I made sure it had built in 802.11g wifi. It had a problem with the DC jack when I sold it. Memories!!!

I just had mine arrive yesterday for my retro laptop collection. I had it's identical cousin growing up (1100) and I remember this model being one of the famous lawsuit models. One overheated frequently and the other could catch fire if I remember correctly.

Wow, my dad had damn near the exact same setup back then, but I believe his had the Radeon. Either way, really cool to see one of these again.

One of these old chunks of metal was my first computer ever. It was a different model though. A Latitude D630 from 2007 that came with Windows Vista Business installed on it that was a hand me down from our neighbors. When I got my hands on it, it ran windows 7 professional. Then, I upgraded it to windows 10 32 bit. I tried installing 64 bit windows 10 on it, but it struggled on it, so I went with Linux.

I think i have one of these in the garage from my mother in laws office. I preferred a Thinkpad over it. But fun to see this in the spotlight, I'll have to pull it out and see which one runs better!

I've always wanted a Falcon Northwest Fragbook from the Windows XP era, but considering the pain I went through of using a Dell Latitude from 2005 (arguably NOT a gaming laptop), I think I would pass based mainly of having to put up with a main HDD with the antiquated 44-pin IDE/PATA interface when the newer and more common SATA were just becoming a thing. Sure, nowadays I _could_ just get an mSATA to PATA adapter and run off SSD, but it doesn't seem practical for just a retro gaming machine that I don't exactly use every day.

Ha, well timed Colin! I just bought an XPS600 desktop today for 20 bucks, turned out to have 2x GTX 7800's in SLI but a poopy Pentium D, folks say it won't take a C2D but I'll try. Need to change a few caps but at least it still runs.

I had the inspiron 5100 model years ago with the desktop pentium 4, it was a great machine with good performance but it was running quite hot since it had an desktop cpu. Other than that i pretty liked the design and the aesthetic of the laptop because it looked like it came straight from the early 2000s, and also another surprise was that its original battery was still working, Sadly the display went bad so i took it off and used it as a desktop but after a while it started to malfunction and started to fall apart so i sadly had to salvage the stuff that were still good and scrap the rest of it.

I actually found one of these at a goodwill for 5$ a few years back. Fixed it up nicely.

Also D series lineup were beasts.

From what I read, Windows XP will support NVidia graphics up to Maxwell, but Optimus support requires Windows 7 or later. So the highest performing Windows XP laptop would be a vista-era gaming laptop.

woooow we had this one back in the day, my dad bought it for his work. oh those memories! in 2009 i bought a samsung r560 with my own money - a laptop with a bluray drive! in 2009! still have that thing lying around somewhere... had drive broke.

This machine gives me good memory vibes from my Dell Inspiron 1520. How i was exited of this machine! Deep black mate finish outside, awesome keyboard with just enough movement, cold enough. Paired with Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT it was even able to run Crysis! Shame, what it was paired with TN matrix with 1280x800 pixels, if it only have an IPS screen that would be an ultimate machine. It served me well for a long time... It saw Windows XP, 7 and 8. I have tried Hackitosh with it and fall in love with OSX. This machine was maxed with RAM and replaced CPU (T55xx something), and at the some point of time even SSD was installed! It was end-up as my first FreeNAS server with built-in UPS :) Sadly, it was retired and placed in storage (my hands just can't sell it) and i never saw something so modular, flexible, balanced, upgradable as this machine anymore, but yeah, those days are gone...

This was the first "new" PC I got, when starting college in 2003. They have a design defect where if the backlight is at anything but full brightness, and anything else draws power (eg, the hard disk seeking) the backlight flickers. Dell replaced the video card, the motherboard, the display, then the whole machine. Then on machine #2 they did the video card, the video card again, the motherboard, the display, then the whole machine. By this point the 5150 wasn't made anymore, and they gave me a 9600. I was able to talk them into swapping it for a 600m - the first Centrino / Pentium M laptop from Dell. It was a fantastic machine and I used it for many years! I'd love another 600m, but I don't really want another 5150...

I had this laptop back in the day. Looks like the same specs too. It wasn't bad but I wound up using an older P3 laptop for......mobile.... things. Working on my car during a hot summer with this thing on my leg connected to the odb II port was painful. Also because of the CPU the battery life was terrible. Running games though, you didn't need a heater in the room, it blew hot air like a hair dryer.

Funny, I was actually eyeing one of these on eBay! Decided against it though, since I already have a few Latitudes and Precisions of the era.

Had the low spec Pentium 4 5150 with Wi-Fi and had nothing but trouble. Multiple motherboard issues that required replacement and terrible thermal issues. But was able to run Tycoon 3 impeccably when the stars aligned!

I saved an old Dell Inspiron 7500 from a school I work at. They were clearing out a bunch of old tech that has been hanging about in storage since the 90s and I asked if I could take that one. It's in pretty great cosmetic shape, but I need to get ahold of a power adapter before I can test it. Hoping it works. I'm interested in having a decent Windows 98 machine again for the first time in many years. If it's in working order, or I'm able to repair it if needed, I intend on swapping out the aging HDD for some compact flash storage. I will give it a good cleaning inside and out and will replace the thermal compound as well.

i have the dell inspiron 5100 notebook and yes their perfect for gaming

I happen to think buying a middle-man machine is the way to go. Something like your Thinkpad T420/430 or Dell Precision M4600/6600. They have great support for Windows 7 and older, meaning that running XP on them is relatively easy. Additionally, their I/O selection and even integrated graphics trounce anything available in 2003. For 4:3 gaming, you'll need to run at a funky resolution or go with an external monitor. But anything in widescreen would be easily supported.

I had one of these back in the day, that 478 socket let me put a full desktop variant in it and yeah it ran hot as heck but it ran pretty quickly for a laptop at the time with a wd black replacement hdd

The other day I managed to grab an Acer Ferrari 3200, also from 2003, in good condition for quite a low price (about $ 20), an excellent machine for games of those years.

I had a similar one with the 15,6 inch screen and the centrino 2 chipset . Remember the screen was very dim.

Holy Dell, you did it.

Very nice, I always liked the look of these Dell Laptops. A good Win XP 32Bit - Dos Laptop, though large would be. An Acer Aspire 7520-5071, specs are athlon 64 X2 tk-55 1.9GHZ, GPU Nvidia Geforce 7000m, 2GB DDR2 So-dimm, 17' screen, dual Hard drive caddy (dual booting can work or have a second drive for games inside.) Also one thing many people overlook even though up to 4th gen intel I series can do XP. The Am3 - Am3+ sockets can sometimes run windows XP and very well, I have a older smaller HP machine lying around that I socketed in a Radeon 7970 & a leftover EVGA B-stock PSU and it runs XP very well.

Dude, I had this laptop. I still have it, actually. I used to play Counter-Strike Source at lan parties with it. Awesome laptop.

I remember doing various Windows XP re-installs and upgrades to these from my first job back in the day - interestingly they never bought the Latitude line. Funny, I can't recall the odd Windows key placement on the keyboard!

The first computer I used was my dad's old inspiron, not quite this exact one but similar. It had a dual-core cpu, which had some incompatibilities.

just had to pop my head into the storage closet in the next room, i still have an almost mint INSPIRON 8600 in there, just loved it so much, i remember playing mostly the orroginal FARCRY on it, half life 2, command and conquer generals, it was as i recall a very expensive laptop circa 2004 maybe ? it was a graduation gift from dad, i still have it since it has sentimental value for me.

I still keep my old Alienware M5750 around for XP gaming. A bit newer being bought by me in 2006, but it came with XP and a Core 2 Duo. Also has a discrete "mxm" graphics card (they worked out a standard by then) which was upgraded from an ATI X1800 to an AMD HD4850

I take it personally when Win XP and the early 2000's are described as retro

I had removable plates on mine had the green and red ones.

great video! but i was kind of expecting for you to do a lot more gaming on it, crysis isnt even exaclty from the same time as the laptop itself... maybe you could have tried some half life 2, doom 3, far cry, call of duty 1... idk man, theres a lot of selection for this time than one might think from a quick glance. oh well.

good one

I miss those dell laptops I had one recently and I have ram for those old laptops and want to sell it and I might have other parts too I'll have to look and those old laptops are much better than today's ones I think

Inspiron 5100 was my baby. Fantastic machine other than being a desktop Pentium 4 and containing the heat of the entire universe. Mine had the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500

I had this laptop! I remembered mine (probably wrongly) as having a desktop P4, maybe I specified that? No WiFi. It was a heavy chunky thing, I still have the laptop & camera backpack I had at the time, a modern laptop rattles around in the huge early 2000s pocket.

I made my old ThinkPad X60t a retro XP machine. Sure, it didn't ship with a beefy GPU but it runs all the games I played as a kid on 98 and XP just fine.

I got a Dell Inspiron 8600 around the same time period and was shocked that my 1.6ghz pentium M would outperform my friend's 2.8ghz Pentium 4 in many cases. I also had the Geforce GO 4200TI which was able to beat most of the FX5000 laptop series and some of the low end 6000 series nvidia gpu's. Oddly many years later however i picked up the same model Dell with a 3.2ghz pentium 4 and Radeon 9600 pro ultra (512MB) and it really rips. All in all the FX5200 was a pretty poor performer and i expected that it would struggle. Thanks for the video and the memories that flowed back from it.

I purchased my first laptop around this time but due to budget constraints went with a Toshiba Satellite with an AMD processor. It was, umm, adequate. The Dell you reviewed is a much nicer machine.

I used to have the 5100. amazed that i was able to upgrade the GPU to a Radeon 9200 64MB, and it ran everything I could throw at it. Max Payne 2 was the last game i played on it before moving it on

i love this old Dell laptops! they are really good! i have a Dell Insprion 8600 and i upgrade the GPU to a ATI radeon 9600 Pro and 1.25GB ram! it can run games that are almost 4 years newer like Need For Speed carbon and GTA san andreas! for me is the perfect laptop for windows XP gaming! I love your videos!

I recently picked up a Dell Latitude C840 with a 2.4ghz P4M to run windows 98SE, it absolutely flies running it but getting it setup to run Win98SE was a bit of a challenge since Dell had committed that generation of machines to only run Win2K or WinXP by that time.

People overlook another great xp machine for some old school xp gaming and fun the hp tc1100

I really miss the 00s era of laptops.. Modular, Stylish, easily repairable and durable.

Miss the “hey how’s it going?” days

You might want to look into some scaling options that either integer scale or do the scaling on the nVidia card (it outputs full resolution of panel, but the rendering is done at a lower resolution). I had a 3k panel once and it's pretty bad as well.

Got a Dell Inspiron 8600, running a Pentium-M 1.5ghz, GF Go FX5200 64MB video, 80GB IDE HD, and I've upgraded it to 1.5GB of RAM. I threw all the old games (CivII, NfS I, II, III, and many more) on it. Great old machine.

Not a Dell fan but this isn't the worst laptop I have seen. One thing for sure 256MB with XP is swap file city if you do anything more then read documents. 512MB at a minimum is needed to avoid that. Especially true after they added all the Service Packs and updates turning it into a slug with not enough RAM.

For XP gamind laptop I use Fujitsu-Siemens Celsius H240 with C2D CPU and ATI FireGL V5200 video card, it just rocks.

I really appreciate you using both metric and imperial system of measurements when talking about weight and dimensions. Too often am I annoyed at English-speaking youtubers not realizing they're using an international language

I have 5 or 6 dells from this era. They were given to me about 10 years ago. Although I think yours may be newer.

I had a Dell Inspiron 9100 back in the early mid 2000s it rocked as a gaming system. You could upgrade the CPU and gpu to meet the specs of the best alienware laptops of the era. I currently have a Dell Studio 1735 I am setting up for my old library of 90s and 2000s games. I did build a modern system by Xp standards, amd fx build with a 750TI gpu, but for the reasons mentioned here, I installed a modern OS and sold it. I decided a Laptop will be the better option. Anything too modern/demanding will likely run on my main gaming rig anyway.

omg this was my first laptop! it wasn't the best and it eventually croaked but i still miss it.

Q3 runs on my K6-2 550, with an MX460 that game is incredibly well optimized, and requires very little from the CPU other games of that era not this forgiving, sadly

For late model xp id recommend a Dell Precision M4400, which is just after the gpu underfill plague and can get a core 2 extreme and a quadro 9600gt equivalent.

I had this laptop in college. I bought it new in 2004. I used it up until 2012 and upgraded it to 4gb of ram. I actually had a lot of issues with it, one being that this laptop would constantly overheat, pentium 4s were notorious for that. The other was the headphone jack failed in which Dell had to replace the motherboard on it. The disc drive failed, battery failed, and hard drive failed all during Warranty too. Towards the end of life it started to develop a line down the screen. I do still own this laptop but haven’t turned it on in years. This laptop forced me to go to apple. This is one I do not miss.

The 5150 insane laptop

This XP laptop looks interesting. :)

My moms old work laptop. So many memories on pc games, flash, early 2000's internet and club penguin

My 98SE 'gaming' (its 3D card is pretty poor for the 3D games of the era but its great for the early DirectX era that just won't run on XP+) laptop is also a Dell that does 1400x1050 - they seemed to like that as their high-end 4:3 resolution

I loved quake 3 arena.

Got the same one at home, saved it from the recycling plant I work at Sadly mine didn’t have any HDD inside

i'm currently working on an acer extensa 5420 from 2007. has a amd turion 64 x 2 cpu with ati radeon xpress 1250 gpu. just upgraded the ram to 4gb ddr2 5300s and put windows 7 on it....was never really used due to a faulty cmos battery causing it to never fully power on and just shut off.

I have the XGI Volari GPU module for that same model

I found a 5150 for $30 at a thrift store recently. my laptop has similar specs other than having a WiFi card and also a 2GB ram upgrade I installed. It runs very well for a Windows XP era laptop. Well worth what I paid for it.

actually that one would be perfect for Windows 98. For XP I'd get something more modern from the Vista era like a core2duo and a Geforce 8600GT or 9600GT. Dell Vostro 1500 is a great one to look at.