Coming in at a backbreaking 21 lbs, the
Dell XPS M2010 is the god of impractical
laptops. It has luggage clips. We are looking at
20.1 in of laptop meat. It has nine speakers,
a detachable Bluetooth keyboard, and even an integrated DVD player. These are
exceedingly rare. It took our procurement team nearly 2 years to find
one, but it was worth the effort because I cannot wait to show you guys the
wildest laptop that Dell ever built just
a mere 17 years after they released it.
There are plenty of contenders for the wildest laptop ever built. the ASUS ROG
GX700, Acer Predator 21X, or MSI GT80
come to mind. But what all those other
models have in common is that they were targeted at gamers. The Dell XPS M2010
is therefore unique in that it was actually aimed at businesses, not called
a portable device, but rather a transportable device. It was intended as
more of a workstation that you could move around as opposed to a laptop,
which isn't to say that no one ever tried.
Is that what I'm intended to do right now? That's why this chair is here.
Oh my gosh, I'm already uncomfortable. I would lose circulation in my legs in
like 20 minutes. This thing is so heavy.
It wouldn't slip off my lap, though. Yeah, it's kind of trying to turn back
into oil. This soft touch finish is
nasty. Oh my god.
Oh, she's she thick, boy. Is this a cathode back
lit LCD? Because this thing is enormous
and heavy. I don't know. Finding exact specs very
difficult these days. This has wider ergonomic adjustments
than some modern desktop monitors. Oh, I
get it. It's so you can move the display closer,
kind of like an AIO. There's also some very forward-looking features here. Is
this webcam? Oh, it swivels so you can
always be in frame for your important business meetings. Look at this
delightful trackpad. The fact that this exists raises so many questions like who
bought this? This this someone bought this within Dell. I mean, they knew it
was wild. It was called the Del Camino, a play on the El Camino, which is
neither a truck nor a car, but rather something in between.
That's solid and yet it feels like it's
falling apart. What? Come on.
That's not even true. Starting price for
one of these was $3500, but that was back in 2006. With
inflation, that would be about $5,000
in today money. We ended up paying $330,
and that seems to be entirely due to its rarity, not because it's particularly
functional. With that said, it works better than I would have thought.
Documentation and drivers are still available on dell.com, but with that
said, I forgot how terrible Windows drivers were back in 2006. It took
nearly 4 hours of hitting next in installers to get everything set up on
this. And that wasn't helped by the fact that Windows Vista is essentially no
longer an operating system. It's not even one of those legacy operating
systems that people are still using like Windows XP. When Windows Vista went eol,
everyone was like, "See you." Now, because our CPU is 64-bit capable, we
could have installed Windows 10, but I
actually vetoed that because I thought it'd be more fun to see how Vista works
in 2023 and get that real good nostalgia. You're probably wondering,
given the substantial included keyboard,
I love that this is a full-size desktop keyboard with trackpad, uh, why it is
that I'm going to get a keyboard and mouse. This is the one aspect of the
machine that we were simply not able to get working. You can see all of my
locks, my scroll, my number, and my caps lock are flashing.
Oh, that's because it's in pairing mode. Oh, it's in pairing mode. Yeah.
Oh, so you might say that it has a
functionality impairment.
You think it might have something to do with this?
It feels like you drank a whole juice box and then
threw it all up, rubbed this around in it, and then just let it dry. Like, it's
just gross. Touch it, David. I'm good. Actually, you know what? Before we
connect these, now seems like as good a time as any to take a closer look at the
base unit itself. Now that the keyboard is detached from it, it ends up looking
a lot more like an all-in-one PC than a laptop. But don't kid yourself, it is a
laptop. It has a battery. It uses laptop class components. And perhaps most
importantly, it has the mid2000s version of laptop
hardware expansion. On the right, you will find what appears to be a port for
the subwoofer. Shut up. On the bottom,
you will find a subwoofer. Don't worry, we're going to audition it later. A
removable battery. It's full of round cells.
What's the capacity? I love it. Uh 56 W hours only.
This has 62 in it. I don't think there's a very material
weight difference between this battery and this entire computer. Also on the
bottom, we'll find an air intake. Sticky. When it was new, this was worth
a whopping 1 hour and 42 minutes of battery life, which makes sense for a
gaming machine, but sure as heck doesn't make any sense for a business laptop.
And look at this. It's got a built-in meter. Just click this button to see how
much battery life you have. For expansion, on the side, there's some
weird things. First, we've got this little tiny mini 1394 FireWire at the
size of this thing. I think they could have put a fulls size one, but hey, what
do I know? I'm not an engineer. Next to that, we've got something very
interesting. This is a 13in2 card reader. Now, I'm familiar with the
concept of a twoin-one card reader or even, you know, a 6in-1 card reader, but
what is a something in two card reader?
Well, the weirdest bit is that it's kind of in three. So, with a commonly
available adapter, you can get many SD
and stuff in this one. Oh, don't forget about SDIO.
Yeah. an XD. Very important memory card standards.
What even's memory stick? Uh memory stick. That was Sony's
proprietary flash. Yeah. And then the two is because you
need this big fat one over here to do compact flash type one, compact flash
type two, and micro drive. Micro drive was wild. They were actual mechanical
hard drives that went into a compact flash slot. I forgot about those. We
should do a video on micro drive. get subscribed. Under the compact flash slot
is where things start to get really interesting. If you look very closely,
there's a little engraved expansion card there. That's because this slot
is what we used to have when laptops took expansion cards. This is called
Express Card, and it's actually a PCI Express slot in there that you could use
to add things like high-speed USB or networking connectivity to your laptop.
Not that you would need to add networking to this one. Ah, not only not
only does it have gigabit LAN, it even has an RJ11 connector for the built-in
modem. Dial up, baby. Next to it, we've got,
oh, this is amazing. Uh, Svideo and DVI
out for highdefinition external displays. Apparently, reviewers at the
time got really annoyed that they included in the box an external TV tuner
instead of building it in. I guess that's when Dell started their
dongles. My laptop
doesn't have internal hardware to be permanently attached to the
wall. It's TV Linus. You need to have TV
on something like this. Anywh who, over on the other side, we
have two USB 2 ports. And I don't Oh,
this must be for the TV tuner adapter here. Oh, yeah. Do we have it?
We don't. We don't. Okay. Well, sorry guys. We
don't have the TV tuner that plugs into Oh, the power brick that plugs into this
port is awesome. She's heavy and she'll do Oh, wow. A mere 150 W.
You can get power bricks this size that'll do like 250. Now, finally, on
the left side, we've got a Kensington lock. I mean, you'd hate for this thing to grow legs and wander away. two more
USB 2 ports and a microphone and headphone jack along with this button.
Let's plug in some peripherals now, but oh, I guess there's a few things that we
missed. I alluded to this before, but
not only does the keyboard have integrated media controls, there is a
secondary set of media controls touch sensitive
all along the top of the device that belies its secondary function. After
all, life can't be all about business.
Surely sometimes you want to play
this. I'm gonna put a DVD in it. Uh, Alex, you brought a Blu-ray. That seems
optimist. Shut up. No way. Yeah,
you've got to be kidding me. Apparently. Apparently, it does Blu-rays. I don't know.
We'll start with a DVD. Is this going to get stuck in there? It's not eating it.
Uh. Oo. I don't want to lose this. Yeah, at least it has a good way of connecting to
the internet. Wait, does it have Wi-Fi? It of course it has Wi-Fi. Centrino, I
see you put Opera on here. Is that a hint? Yeah. So, that's the newest one that
will work. I typed these T's together. One of them
was so delayed that it's at the end of the word.
Oh, sophisticated. Okay. Well, okay. With
that in mind, hold on. Oh, that's so cool. Oh, you can see it
spinning through the little Windows. That's awesome. That was totally a
thing. I remember I had a friend that had a Discman that had a window in the
top. There's no way it's going to play this though because this is a 4K
Blu-ray. Like no, no, no, no, no, no, no. These are higher density and it's a
whole thing. Even if it had software support, there's no way that old drive
is going to play it. Play DVD movie. Well, let's use Windows Media Center,
obviously. Man, throwback. That's kind of like what Steam Big Picture is to
gaming, but for media on your home theater PC. Oh, wait. It's just playing.
It was that easy.
There we go. This is bar none, by far the best
sounding laptop that I have ever heard. And the touch controls work,
responsive. I am now downloading Power DVD1 from
oldver.com. Um, it has been tested free from
spyware, adwear, and viruses.
Dell premium remote control. Oh, that's the remote control software.
Remote control? Like I can control this remotely? No, like it had a remote and the remote
was sick cuz it had a gyroscope in it, so you could use it as a mouse as well.
Oh, I haven't really talked about the specs of the screen. It's 1680x 1050,
which was a common resolution for 20-in displays at the time. Uh, which is good
because it's a 20-in display. Uh that's an aspect ratio of what is that 5x4 or
whatever. 16x10. That's 16 by10.
Yeah. In CNET review they noted that that resolution and aspect ratio was not
quite the holy grail of 1080p but that
it was widescreen and gives plenty of desktop space to display multiple
documents side by side. 1080p holy
grail. Really? Yeah. 16x9 was always worse. CET always. Uh,
it has a 1.3 megapixel webcam, which I guess we can play with while this
installs. It's right on the right there. Quick
cam. Oh, it's a Logitech webcam.
Yeah. What is this? What is this interface?
Video effects. No way. I can do like AR
filters and stuff. Oh, wait. Maybe you need to open webcam
software for this to work. Okay. Oh, a webcam was not found or is
not working properly. It's worth noting that at this point we've spent about
half an hour trying to get Blu-ray playback working. I'm trying to install
Power DVD 9, which I had on a drive
somewhere. Um, and it's not because the
computer's slow, you know, only 33% CPU
usage. It's just it involves a lot of hacky workarounds. Oh, the webcam's
working now. I got it working. I would say that that did not improve
much at all. But in fairness to it, this is a modern webcam that frankly
doesn't look that much better. I almost like the look of the old one
more. Like it feels more natural than this. Yeah, this has a lot of smoothing on it.
Okay. And Power DVD is still installing. Okay. It is slow, but a lot of that is
down to the mechanical hard drive. Oh, how big is the hard drive on this thing?
Ah, yes. 250 GB. This shipped with a
RAID zero drive configuration.
That is an awful idea. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is your first time
playing a BDROM title. You need to select a region. Okay. Region A.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Your graphics card is incompatible.
What? Come on. What's What's the GPU in this
thing? X1800.
What the hell is an X? Oh my good. It's ATI.
Yeah, not AMD. ATI. R129164.exe
seems legit. I mean, it's off dell.com. It's probably fine. All files were
successfully unzipped. Oh, okay. Here we go. Oh, yeah.
Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time. Wait, was unable to find
components that could be installed on your current hardware. Please make sure
you have the required hardware or software. What are you talking about?
Where's device manager? Oh, right. You can't do that there yet. Um,
yeah, but search worked, so it's fine. We found something called do not argue
ATI drivers, which seems to be a modified version of the Catalyst install
manager that is not digitally signed, but at least seems to attempt to
install. So, what we're going to do, because this was so easy back then, is
disable driver signature enforcement. Yay. Okay, maybe these are legit, but
they do sketch me out a little bit. You can tell they've altered some stuff. I
don't know what do not argue.com is. Maybe something to do with these drivers. I know that modified AMD drive
or ATI drivers were totally a thing back then. The display driver installed.
Success. Success. Success. Error messages. I don't see any. I mean,
let's go. Did we do it? Maybe.
Crap. Same thing. I think we're worse off than before. No,
we have drivers now, but they're not
working. whereas before we didn't have drivers. It was just using Windows
drivers, but they were working. Before we try yet another sketchy driver
package, I threw the Microsoft drivers back on. Let's see if they're working
for 3D acceleration. So, I don't know if we want to like actually play the game
once we get in here. Apparently, this GPU has a little bit of an issue where
uh the thermal limits don't really work.
So, it kind of blows itself up. Oh, years ago, she's working.
65 years. Is that Patrick Stewart? Yeah.
God, it sounds good. Have you ever heard bass like that out of a laptop?
For the emperor.
And that's where our story ends. So, I have the king of modern laptops.
This is like the benchmark, the MacBook Pro. Yeah.
Sounds like a toy. Admittedly, there is a clarity advantage
to the MacBook Pro, but when it comes to
sheer hutzah,
that's what eight forward-facing drivers
are going to do for you. Not to mention the subwoofer. Should I give up on
Blu-ray playback or should we try one more sketchy driver? We found
one more. We could also try a different sketchy Blu-ray player.
I think we're reaching the end of our options here. We tried this weird Leoo
Blu-ray player, and I mean, it wasn't officially compatible with Vista anyway,
so it shouldn't be much of a surprise it didn't work. And we couldn't get any
other driver package to properly install.
Then we went back to our first solution that we looked at and went, "Ah, that
sounds like too much trouble. Let's update the drivers." Play. And
here we go. Let's go. This is not a bad looking display for how old it is. Is
this IPS? It's got to be. You know, I bet that's part of why this thing was so
expensive. My old boss at NCIX had probably the same panel on his desk. It
was an NEC 20.1 in IPS that looked
amazing compared to anything else at the time. And it was glossy just like this.
Yeah, I think it might look better. Not bad. Why don't we open it up and
find out what makes it tick? A new journey is about to begin.
Obviously, all the guts are going to be in the bottom of the unit here. There's
no obvious screws other than this one. Well, look at this. Lionus 76 page
service manual tells you how to take out literally everything.
Oh, good. So, yeah, that's the next step. This is pretty easy to get in. Oh,
whoa. That's awesome. One screw gets you
access to what am I looking at here? Two DDR2 sodium slots. My wireless card,
which is using I don't know, I forget what this standard is called. It's
certainly not M.2. It would be the older like some kind of mini PCIe thing. Looks
like there was an optional secondary slot. I don't know what that would have
been used for. Maybe even like like a mobile SIM card or something like that.
I'm just guessing at this point. And then what do we find if we go deeper?
Wait. Wow. There's a lot of cooling in this thing. Is this all cooler? Holy
snikes. Oh, wow. Look at this. You just
put a screwdriver in there and the top pops off. No way.
No way. Okay, I think I've got them in. Do you
want to pop it up? Uh, no. I don't have it in. Oh. Oh. Oh.
Hello. Wait. What is happening? What is happening?
Okay, that just came right off. Oh, okay. One sec.
Okay. Aha. Okay.
What are we looking at now? Now we remove these screws and the whole
thing comes off, I think. Okay.
Look at the size of that heat pipe. Oh
my goodness. What are you compensating
for, bud? And I guess this is where the second hard drive was over here. Okay,
here's my Blu-ray drive. Man, this is
like solid. This had to be machined out
of a solid freaking piece of aluminum here. That was not normal back then.
That was very unusual. There's no way. Look at this. It has to be. Look at it.
I mean, are you sure it's not plastic? Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. Search your
feelings. It's aluminum. That's not It is. Yeah. Oh, I thought you were trying to
Okay, I told you it's metal. I know. That would just be such an
expensive part. I know. Look at the size of these fans,
too. These are huge.
Not dissimilar to the size of a desktop fan. I mean, an older, smaller one, but
still. And is there a reason you said that we have to take off the GPU cooler?
Uh because the GPU will cook itself. I
also just looked it up. So on the ASUS Zephris G14,
there's 83 fan blades on their fan. This
is what I don't know 15, 20, maybe 17.
Nice. So this is a Core 2 Duo, right? Which
means that it did not have a built-in memory controller. So Oh, whoops.
The chip that Alex thought was cheese by
the chip then that Alex thought was the CPU since it has a giant freaking heat
pipe strapped to it is not in fact the CPU but appears to actually be the
motherboard chipset. That's where the memory controller was.
Wait, is the thing socketed? Holy crap. It is.
Oh, hell yeah. Since in 2005
I built my own laptop. I bought an ASUS
M 5NE. I bought a CPU, bought RAM. You could
actually do that. You could buy barebones laptops, put your own CPU in, even mobile chips. This isn't a desktop
socket. This is going to be a mobile chip socket. There are daughter boards in this thing
that seem to be as big as the main boards on some modern laptops.
Everything was so much less efficient. Uh, this thing, uh, you said it has a
60watt hour battery. 62. Yeah. Okay, this with its 50 somethingwh
battery managed an hour and a half. What does this do? Probably like 8 10 hours.
15. Like actual real world 15.
Unbelievable. Wow. There's your CPU.
Oh, Lionus. We could have the only liquid metal Dell
M2010 and then it would die. Yeah, we shouldn't do that.
Okay, this is cool. Check this out. This is how these uh mobile sockets worked.
You have a little slot. Uh, there we go.
Oh, and then it slides. And then you pop
it out. Yeah, just a little something like that. And it's a little slidy slide. Watch
this. Watch this.
I need like a razor blade. How did you get this off?
I just covered in IPA and then did that. Heck. The thing Alex is concerned about is
that our GPU in particular has no built-in thermal protections. So, if we
try to run Crisis and this thermal compound does not hold up, which it
might not, we could very well cook it and actually kill it. And replacing this
thing, given that MXM modules were not exactly necessarily always the same from
one model to the next would be very difficult. Time to throw her back
together and see if she does run Crisis. Oh, we don't we didn't put the bottom
back on. Oh, the bottom. Uh, where did that even go?
I don't know. H. Does it really need it?
Might as well. Yeah, we're here. But can it play Crisis?
Well, first Cinebench. Ah, Cine. Now, what's the point? It's
going to take like 3 hours to run, Alex. It's fine. It's fine cuz it's Cinebench
R10, I think. Oh. Oh, you know, I'm kind of curious if
there's something obviously dead about the keyboard.
How does this come apart? Alex will run Cinebench and I will do this.
We will parallelize David. Yeah. Alex made this handle so that it will
fit my hands and his hands. How impressive is that? You're not going to
hold up your hand. Sure. See, you know what they say about people with like not huge or anything hands.
Wait, shut up. This has a removable battery.
Oh, wow. Freaking why. This has been running for a while. I
just started the 15. Alex, this is a 14wh hour battery.
Anyway, I just ran Cinebench for fun on the XPS5, but I ran it before while it
was plugged in in high performance mode and got a score of 80,000 points in R10.
We were able to get a score of 4,825
points. That's uh yeah, 16 times slower
than the XPS 15, which is what? Four
times smaller. Yeah, four times lighter.
But can it run Crisis? Holy.
I just paired to the keyboard. Holy crap. You got it to work. Okay, here it
is. Oh, yeah. It's working.
Oh, this is amazing. I will play me some Blu-rays.
Oh, now I can game on the trackpad. Uh,
okay. That is not what that is supposed to
look like. How's my night vision doing? Hey, what's up, team? This is totally
running. all low low resolution and everything,
but it's running. Oh. Uh
oh, wow. That's uh that is not supposed
to be there. Um,
we specifically were like, "Okay, let's play the game for a little bit longer so
we can get to that point where you come out over the hill in the daylight and you you see everything in the distance."
I don't think that GP is too happy. Yeah, this is not how this was supposed
to go down. What I was supposed to do is tell you
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our recent video on the weird gaming laptop we got from AliExpress.
Weirder? No, probably not. No, but very weird.