Today's new toy is actually an old toy: a Dell Latitude X1 ultra-portable laptop that was originally released in early 2005. The fact that it is still running twelve years later is fairly impressive. I was once skeptical of the price premium Dell charged over their consumer product line, but I've seen enough consumer Dell die off while their business Dell counterparts kept trucking to change my mind. While I still might not choose to pay that premium, I now believe the price difference buys a more durable product.

Or perhaps the credit should go to Samsung? When I searched for reviews of this old laptop, I found this review which claimed the laptop is a rebadged Samsung Q30. The article even helpfully included a picture of the Q30 so we can see cosmetic similarities (and the differences.)

There are dings and dents from over a decade of service, but aside from the expected degradation in battery capacity, the machine seems to be running much as it did over a decade ago. I booted it up to verify that it could still do so (Looks like the previous owner installed Ubuntu 11) before I started digging into the hardware.

Looking into the BIOS, I find the processor is an Intel Pentium M ULV 733, a 32-bit single-core low-power processor running at a modest 1.1 GHz. It is definitely out of date in the current age of 64-bit multi-core multi-gigahertz CPUs but we might still be able to work with it.

There is 1.2 gigabytes of RAM, an unusual amount that I'm sure it was quite a luxurious amount in its day. Not so much today, but not as bad as it could have been. In the days of Windows Vista there was an expectation that computer memory baseline would keep moving up, 2 then 4 then 8 gigabytes and beyond, but it hasn't panned out that way. Demand emerged to run on lower-end hardware so recent builds of Linux and Windows 10 both included provisions to run on inexpensive tablets with 1 gigabyte or less of RAM.

The same break in the capacity trend also applied to storage. This machine has only a 30 gigabyte hard drive, and hard drive capacity have grown to multiple terabytes within the past decade. But the advent of solid-state storage plus the desire for inexpensive tablets with modest storage meant operating systems had to stay slim.

All the remaining accessories follow the same trend - definitely out of date but surprisingly still within the realm of relevance. A screen with resolution of 1280x768, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, Ethernet and USB, SD card reader, all the trappings expected of a modern laptop.

There are a few amusing anachronisms: a CompactFlash reader in addition to the SD reader. There is no HDMI video out port - just VGA. And the best one of all - a telephone jack for dial-up modem connectivity.

LatitudeX1Modem