Dell Called It "The Showstopper"

this is the Dell XPS m2010 it's from 2006 and while this may shock some viewers I think this is a good computer you see I'm not the first person to cover this thing it's been kind of a meme for a while but it feels like the first thing anyone does is make fun of it it's always dumb insane or monstrous but I just think it's a good design never for me I wasn't the target audience but for the person this is intended for it's a brilliant original concept that tackles a whole range of consumer Desires in a cost Noob fashion up to and including inventing whole new approaches to human interface that wouldn't reappear for years if at all so I want to give you a tour top to bottom and show you not just the technical qualities and not just what makes it weird but what I think would have delighted the market that Dell had in mind of course there is one thing we have to get past first it is indeed a lap top you can fold the screen down it has latches that hold it closed and you can pick it up by the leather wrapped carrying handle and take it with you somewhere it runs off a DC brick and it even has a battery which actually works better than you'd think so this machine really can be used on the go but I have to admit up front that I'm not sure why that is I think the battery compromises this machine in several ways we'll talk about that later but I still don't think that it makes it worthy of ridicule but I admit it's impossible not to giggle at it at first I mean once you learn that this is a laptop the obvious joke is Imagine using that on your lap but let's be fair how many other machines can we say that about would you want to use my Toshiba Cosmo on your lap this would probably crush your legs or give you first-degree Burns assuming it managed to run long enough on battery to even get hot the fact is though the term laptop has been inaccurate basically since it was created how many machines ever get used used on someone's lab and it's not really clear why we use it because there's always been better Alternatives consider the term notebook for instance the earliest use I could find was by Epson describing their hx20 computer back in 1982 so that's pretty far back there and literally four words later infoworld describes it as lap sized so it's very possible that both terms were born on pretty much the same day and they've been fighting for dominance ever since and the really wild thing is that eps machine didn't even fold the modern clamshell design didn't show up until the grid Compass a year later and at the same time the PC industry has a rich history of portable machines that aren't notebooks from the luggable compact that sparked off the Clone Market to begin with to dol's lunchbox machines and continuing into the 2000s with shuttles and land party cases with big handles on top none of these machines folded either or had batteries you were expected to tote them somewhere and plug them into the wall and when we think of this machine in those terms as a modern luggable it makes a lot more sense in fact that's exactly what CET wrote about it at the time almost verbatim and okay I'm still not exactly sure where Dell imagined you would lug this thing but that's a question for the end user we'll worry about it later for now let's just look at what it is and what it offers the industrial design is unlike anything I've ever seen before it's a completely unique form factor it may look sort of like a throwback to 80s home computers like the Apple 2 where the keyboard is built into the chassis but in fact the computer is just this wedge back here the front half is actually a separate unit that's held onto the machine with spring catches so you can pull it loose and use the keyboard and trackpad independently over Bluetooth and before you ask yes the screen still latches shut with the keyboard removed because there's two sets of latches one for either half of the machine and some kind of ingenious mechanism that deploys those latches automatically as you lower the screen also While most Bluetooth peripherals of the time ran off doublea's this one actually uses a lithium ion battery it's like a little baby laptop pack except with a really long screw holding it in for some reason it's adorable and it also still works perfectly also since this docks to the PC Dell put contacts on the back that made up with these and keep the thing charged automatically it's incredibly slick especially with the included trackpad now of course most people consider a trackpad less than ideal for a desktop PC but that's okay because Dell included a normal Optical Mouse as well which also connected over Bluetooth now I should admit this I think this peripheral is incredibly clever for reasons we'll go into later but it doesn't have the best ergonomics trackpads were pretty much universally bad at this point in time for some reason nobody made a good one and it's made worse by Dell using these buttons with the weird raised rubber Ridge they really likeed these back then but they're just awful and it's one of the only real misses on the entire machine but it is still usable in a pinch the keys are also not full height I think they're a little bit taller than what you get on a contemporary laptop but still not that great they're also membrane of course but everything was back then and the layout isn't what I wish it was they did do an admirable job of finding a place to shove in the touchpad I've seen this done worse but still I have kind of a hard time typing it full speed on this thing [Applause] you know what actually uh when I tried this at home I was working on a much smaller desk and my error rate was way higher but now that I've got this space to work with okay it's not perfect to be sure but it's a lot better than what I thought and if I wasn't trying to type that fast I actually would have a much better opinion of this keyboard so I take it back it's actually pretty damn good now any full contact computer user still would have wanted something better but I don't think that's who this was for this is for the pure middle-of the road consumer and for them this would have been fine and it really could have been a lot worse likewise removing the keyboard could make the PC look pretty awkward but instead I think this looks almost like a high-end stereo component you know you're banging oliv and beo Center sort of thing The Styling is pretty solid if they'd gone with the then popular shiny piano black trim like HP was doing this would look cheap dated and beat to hell at this point but instead they use brushed anodized aluminum and it still looks terrific in the center we have the optical drive and that feels even more like European stereo gear the controls are all touch sensitive which is kind of a bummer but it was also the style of the time they do at least give plenty of visual feedback and when we hit eject it lifts the drive up to accept a disc and when we put a disc in it lowers it back down automatically and then we can see the disc spinning up through a window on the top we'll be looking a lot more in depth at the hardware later but I just like to note right now this is a custom Drive okay that's weird the majority of desktop and laptop Optical drives are completely generic with at most a little bit of plastic trim on the front but this actually uses a special slot loading optical drive with a window built into the top I'm sure that's not an off-the-shelf part Dell almost certainly had to commission that from tac so we haven't even made it halfway through the outside of the machine and we're already looking at two completely bespoked components that you couldn't get anywhere else it's ridiculous next up we have the monitor which is 20.1 in you shouldn't even make laptops smaller than that and you know I was going to convert this into centimeters but then I got this chill down my spine when I realized that I've never heard anybody say oh yeah I have a 38 CM Macbook so yeah I looked it up and it seems like laptop manufacturers only use inches no matter where you are in the world that's weird right so this is an enormous display but to be clear it wasn't unique the Acer Spire 9800 was being sold at the same time with the same size screen although it used a conventional laptop form factor which CET panned as totally impractical and not much later HP came out with the HDX 9000 Dragon a machine that's pretty clearly a response to this one it does split the difference though between the XPS and the Aspire design but once again it had the same size screen I suspect in fact they all used literally the same panel the XPS and the dragon seem to use the exact same LG part number and while the Acer doesn't I wouldn't be surprised if they were just rebranding the same panel because it's very hard to find any other screens with this size and aspect ratio see this is a 16 by10 display and that's a ratio that I I think was more popular in the 20000s it's definitely still around now but it's what I had in my first LCD monitor in like 2003 and it's it's a neat ratio there are advantages to the slightly increased vertical real estate especially for productivity but it's an odd Choice here because all three of the machines I just named were multimedia powerhouses the HP Dragon had a media center remote that snapped into the Palm rest next to the keyboard the Acer had a built-in HD DVD player and as I'll be proving throughout this video the m2010 was definitely intended for watching TV and movies for which a 169 ratio would be a much better fit the resolution is also a bit surp surprising it's only 1680 by1050 and don't get this Twisted 2006 was still early for HD adoption but for the market segment that this was aimed at full HD was definitely an option Dell themselves were selling an xpsm 1710 at the exact same time that had a 1920x 1200 panel so this not being full HD seems tough to swallow sure enough CET thought it was an absurd limitation when they reviewed the HP Dragon a year later but as far as I can tell this happened because nobody ever made a full HD 20-in panel I've searched and I could not find a single one you could get smaller or bigger but 20-in displays were either 1680 x150 or 1,600 by 900 no other options that seems weird but I guess they were stuck with it Dell couldn't go any bigger without the machine becoming cartoonishly large so this is what they were stuck with in its defense though it's pretty damn good for the era compared to some contemporary machines that I've seen it's bright as hell it's incredibly clear and crisp and the off AIS viewing is excellent or to put it more simply while using the machine I have not noticed that it's not full HD the resolution has never bothered me and I doubt it bothered many people at the time so I see why they made the compromise it's just weird that they had to also to their Credit Dell did their best to make the display ergonomic the huge aluminum linkage back here articulates in not just one but two places so you can position this monitor higher or lower or tilt it up and down you could even conceivably use it while standing and in the lowered position it scooted a lot closer to you than it is in the rear position here so this is no ergotron to be sure but it's more flexible than any other portable computer that I'm aware of so I have to call this monitor excellent I guess since we're looking at the monitor I do have to mention the webcam this was the early era of Skype calling and whatnot so it does include one and it is total crap as you'd expect this is what the webcam looks like under heavy Studio light so you can imagine what it was like in a normal environment o also no I have no idea what docu sign impact is I got this at the thrift store for like a dollar it's basically junk but what else is new what isn't junk however is the audio situation this machine rocks a nine speaker sound system which is unparalleled Maybe by everything like has anybody made another portable computer with that many drivers I certainly haven't seen one and and you haven't either so far since there's only eight up here the ninth is a subwoofer on the bottom I'll show you that later when we take it apart but in short this system sounds amazing for what it is the speakers are tiny and there's only so much you can do by adding more of them whatever Bose wants you to believe but this beats any laptop and most desktop speaker sets that I've ever heard now obviously this being a YouTube video it's hard to demonstrate that you'll just be hearing it through a a manl vocal mic but we'll do our best here's a couple samples [Music] [Applause] [Music] take my word for it this system sounds so good that while I was working on this script there were a few moments where I played a song to test something and I just left it playing my library on shuffle while I did other stuff cuz it just sounded really good and that's a hell of a compliment for a portable computer especially of this age so there's a lot more to look at but let's just pause for a moment and sum up our first impressions cuz I think those are the most important thing here as a person with money burning a hole in their pocket in 2006 you know pre housing crisis you walk into Circuit City and you see this thing on display walking up to it you see a screen that's as bright and sharp as your brand new HDTV and it feels almost as big at least compared to other computer monitors it also looks like a piece of high-end AV gear it's got brushed metal highlights and no visible cables right so you use the wireless mouse to open Windows Media Player and you play a demo song and it sounds better than the Bose Wave stereo you have in your kitchen you're going to be pretty stunned by this I promise there was nothing on the market that stood out the way this machine did you're not going to think what a silly laptop you're going to think wow this could replace my entire AV Center and that's definitely what Dell intended the m2010 came with a whole raft of accessories without which you can't really get the full picture literally as you'll see so let's go through the ports and Slots on this thing and at the same time we'll see what goes in them starting on the right side we've got a fire wire port or as Sony would have called it ey link since it's the smaller four pin plug now it might seem odd that uh dell didn't put the larger plug on there but Sony was pushing iink really hard uh throughout the 2000s since they made both PCS and camcorders and you know transferring video from your camcorder was really the only function that most PC users saw for firewire so they probably had a lot of four pin to four pin cables and that's probably why Dell chose the smaller plug and besides ingesting video you could also pull in photos from your digital camera with the built-in readers for SD memory stick XD picture card and over here CF and since this came with Windows Movie Maker and the drive is a DVD burner this machine is basically ready to go for most forms of contemporary content creation there's also an Express card slot where you could add whatever expansions you needed and I have a suspicion that what Dell really thought you'd put in there was a cable card but to save everyone four minutes I'll just put my theories on that in the description since they're probably wrong anyway moving around the backside we've got a phone jack here because it was 2006 and dialup was still around and then we have an ethernet port because it was 2006 and dialup was dying but then we have DVI and this might seem a little out of place you'd think a device that was media focused would have had HDMI but that took a while to get fully off the ground especially in PCS you pretty much couldn't get a graphics card with HDMI in 2006 so most commercial TVs and projectors still had DVI inputs in fact if we look at a contemporary Samsung TV the ports are labeled HDMI SL DVI Samsung knew that PCS wouldn't have HDMI but the standards were compatible you could connect them with a passive adapter and of course a lot of people hadn't even upgraded to displays with any kind of digital input yet so dv's ability to be adapted to VGA was another good reason to include it on the machine now this next Port here that's the AV port and that's another acknowledgement of the complicated display ecosystem of this era if you hadn't yet upgraded to an HDTV you could plug in your standard def set here over s video or you can get an adapter cable that would convert it to composite now both ran at 480i which was showing its age for sure but I can tell you that in 2006 seeing your PC show up on a TV at all still made you feel like a king among men even if it was some awful 852 x480 Ed TV like I had now if you had one of the really early HD sets though you could use a different dongle this guy here to get analog component that wasn't quite as sharp as digital but it would run 1080 and I can tell you it looked more than good enough for the time okay especially since the TBS that required it were often 720p or rear projection based so we've got lots of Av ins and outs so far this is looking pretty good but it's not that remarkable lots of laptops had adapters like this but we're not done yet coming around the left side we've got two USB 2.0 and then we've got mic and headphone Jacks and then a Bluetooth pairing button for the keyboard that's an interesting feature I'm not sure I've ever seen a physical pairing button on a PC before I'm not sure why it seems like a good idea now before HDMI you couldn't get audio and video out of your computer in the same plug so whatever you were using to hook up your TV you'd need to get the audio out separately now this headphone jack could be adapted to RCA to plug into your TV or your stereo receiver but it's not line level it's pre-amplified and it's only stereo so if you're watching a DVD with 5.1 audio and you have a surround sound system you don't want to get overdriven 2.0 audio instead so that's why when we come around the back here next to the uh two additional USB ports we also have this odd thing this connector looks a lot like display port uh which had actually just come into existence in 2006 fortunately however the plugs aren't actually the same because this actually goes to a Dell AV breakout box which offers 7.1 audio digital SP diff and two outputs for IR blasters which I'll touch on in a moment and to complete the look the final accessory that Dell included was a TV tuner either atsc or dvb depending on where you were I'm not 100% sure that this was the exact model that came with this machine since it didn't work with the driver from the Dell utility disc but it sure looks like the one that PC Magazine got and a tuner is a tuner so it doesn't much matter the important thing is that with this we now have all the pieces of the puzzle the m2010 is incomplete unless you have all of the ins and outs which pretty much covers all the in and out that you could possibly want for this era so let's take a short look at how this would all come [Applause] together so obviously I don't have the need or the space to hook this up to a stereo receiver and a TV and whatnot you can imagine you'd plug this into your whole AV center right now software wise I've tried to set this machine up almost exactly as it would have shipped so it's got Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 as was typical for the time this did include the Vista ready badge and when Vista was released a few months later Dell did switch to it on the 2010 but this machine had the XP COA so that's what I stuck with to my detriment as you'll hear later I don't have the full list of software that would have shipped on this thing but I've installed everything that was on the Dell utilities disc and their machines tended to be pretty light on bloatware from the few screenshots that I can find I see Microsoft Office one or maybe two CD burning tools Adobe Acrobat windows media center and media player and not a lot else so I've stuck with a pretty minimal setup on here and I didn't bother installing office I did install power DVD though since it absolutely would have had that if for no other reason than to enable Windows Media Center to play DVDs we also have a number of games and we'll get to those later but the focus of any Media Center PC is the Windows Media Center app itself I've talked about Windows Media Center several times before and it's largely self-explanatory so we're just going to kind of gloss over it we'll uh go and Fire up from the Icon [Music] here and it launches into a full screen interface uh that's what we call a 10t UI cuz you can use it from 10 ft away and still see what you're doing so from here we can do everything you would want to do on a media center PC we can uh play music we can look at pictures uh we can play the videos that we've edited together from our camcorder footage uh and we can play DVDs now most of these modes you can probably imagine so we'll just pick a couple like uh the DVD functionality let's put a disc in and it shows right up we can just pick a chapter here this is the Dell XPS m1210 and it's completely unremarkable so like I said before the audio sounds great the video is clear no real notes except for the fact of course that because this is a 16 by10 screen we've got a good solid inch of letter boxing top and bottom but like I said there wasn't a whole lot Dell could do about that one of the biggest features of media center though was the TV mode it's pretty much meant to replace a to so you'd have this sitting next to your TV wired into your antenna and that's what I've got here I've got the tuner hooked up to an antenna and I think I'll actually be able to pick up a couple of channels here so let's get this guy ready now this version of media center apparently has no ability to automatically scan for digital channels so I actually had to go in here and program them in by hand so I think I've got like Fox and PBS and not much else uh well we can't get KIRO let's see what else we got in here no dice on me TV let's turn this unlabeled knob does that do anything no it doesn't seem to all right let's try another Channel okay there we go we got Fox wow that actually worked really well oh no not so well actually well that's the HDTV experience in a nutshell it either works perfectly or not at all definitely an upgrade that made things so much better thank you atsc commission anyway like I said this is supposed to replace a toot so if we come down here and hit pause it'll pause live TV and start buffering it onto the hard drive and then we can just uh play it back whenever we come back from the bathroom or whatever or we can hit record here and it'll just start recording it to the drive and we can come back later and watch a whole episode whenever we want uh also if there was TV Guide data available obviously they took those Services down eons ago uh we'd be able to go in and tell it to record you know every episode of Law and Order or whatever also you remember remember earlier I mentioned you could plug IR blasters into the AV breakout box those were little infrared LEDs that you'd stick to the front of your cable or satellite box and then if you have a scheduled recording Media Center can use those to turn on the box dial in a channel and then turn it off again when it's done recording it was all very slick so as you can see this really could replace your entire AV Center your CD player your DVD player and even your TV tuner and too could all go into this one machine but of course that's just the raw feature set right like any Media Center PC could do all that we want to talk ux we're sitting right in front of this thing definitely not the intended experience if this is a 10t UI how's it perform from 10 ft away well that's a very interesting question on this computer in particular you see all Media Center PCS came with a standardized answer to this problem it was the media center remote Microsoft mandated these things and every vendor had their own design I've got a few here they're all slightly different but large the same they were required to have certain things in common like the enormous green media center button here that uh basically just opens the program and acts as a back button now these shipped with every machine that came with media center but they had two limitations one is that they were infrared so your machine needed a receiver which was usually one of these obnoxious little boxes that had like a 15t USB cord and there's no way to hold it down so whever you put it it has a tendency to sort of slurp itself off behind your Cabinetry uh and also you needed line of sight to this thing so you couldn't you know pause your music from the kitchen or whatever and secondly these remotes offer no way to interact with any software outside of media center the remote just does nothing in the rest of Windows Dell solved both these problems in very unusual ways first of course we've got the wireless keyboard since this is Bluetooth you could carry it into the kitchen and use the playback controls on the right side these are duplicates of the ones on the chassis which tells us that Dell didn't make this Wireless just to help declutter your desktop you were expected to use this from the sofa uh the trackpad is more evidence of same it seems redundant when you first see it since they did ship a normal Mouse but this is really the only kind of pointing device that you can use while balancing it on your knee I mean there's track points but a lot of people don't like those myself included so with this keyboard in hand you can control any software on your PC from a distance filling in the Gap that was left by the normal Media Center remote of course on that note the keyboard and mouse aren't very good at controlling Media Center itself but again Dell wasn't satisfied with the usual solution the m2010 also included a media center remote but it's what Dell calls their premium remote and let me tell you that's under selling it this thing is beyond premium I'd say it's more impressive than everything else about this computer combined it's utterly singular as far as I know it's the actual subject of this video and I can't believe I'd never heard of it at a glance it just appears to be another Media Center remote you've got the uh media Center Jewel you've got the playback controls but that's where the resemblance ends for one thing check this out let's uh dial in some TV here yeah dial in that's what people say about TV definitely that's normal if I put this thing under the desk I can still pause my program because it's not infrared it's RF but it still has an IR transmitter on the front because it's also a universal remote and a learning one to boot you can look up a list of codes for it or you can just point your ex in TV remote at the receiver on the bottom and it'll clone the signaling now I don't think this feature was fully unique there seemed to be other Media Center universal remotes but I'm not sure any of them had learning capability there was also one RF remote from X10 but it also wasn't IR so I think the combination of the two is unique now it does only support one device uh your TV and that's a bit of a bummer it'd be nice if it could control more things but in theory you wouldn't have any more things right just your TV and your Dell this is enough to let you turn the set on and off change the inputs and control the volume and everything else should be happening on your PC it's called convergence bub and you better learn to like it cuz it's it's worth it honestly it's it's worth it people who got this working loved it the next feature though is definitely unique right above the media center jewel is a motion gyration button and real heads know what this is and have been spitting at their monitors and shock for several minutes sorry I had to do it my way even with Windows Media Center having a fully 10 foot aied UI you sometimes just have to Mouse around anyway once in a while you're going to run into something that isn't doable from the remote or that's just way too tedious now the wireless keyboard combo solves for a lot of that but if you're sitting on the couch channel surfing you don't want to haul along this whole boat anchor just in case you need to clear a popup so to solve this the Dell remote integrates a gyroscopic Mouse based on the gyration design there's an accelerometer in here and when we press this button and wave the remote around it moves the mouse cursor much like a weote now this was not a unique feature on its own gyration had been selling mice that worked this way since the '90s but none of them were built into a remote control as far as I know now I don't want to mince words this is not the most Pleasant thing to use gyration normal air mice were actually quite a bit nicer they had a trigger on the bottom so you could just squeeze to enable movement and then click with your thumb but here the trigger on the top next to the mouse buttons to drag and drop for instance you have to press the button Mouse over what you want roll your thumb on onto the mouse button and then hold them both down while you drag it's really quite a strain on the muscles uh but it is at least doable and that's way beyond the Call of Duty here it's funny cuz I was I was dragging a battlefield icon and I said Call of Duty that's hilarious the fact that you can clear a goddamn power DVD automatic update dialogue without getting up and fetching the keyboard is more than good enough everybody had this problem back in the day this thing is really a breathtaking achievement just for that reason but then there's more going on with it we've got two utterly unique and one nearly unique feature all packed into one remote so Dell is batting a thousand here but if you can bat 1200 they did that too because we're not done prce yourself for feature number four if I press the music button here that is my Windows Media Player library and I can navigate through this on the remote itself pick an artist pick an album play a song without ever touching the computer this means that even if I can't see the PC if I'm in the kitchen prepping dinner I can dig through my music and pick a song and start playing it without needing the TV on or the laptop screen open or even being able to see the computer because it shows you everything you need to know including the playback status directly on the remote itself folks I have never seen anything even a tiny bit sort of remotely like this remotely yeah that's good that's good I didn't even script that when I saw this feature I just about pissed myself this is the most 2000s thing I've ever seen it's the most ambitious ostentatiously ambitious thing that I've ever seen it deserves more adjectives this is an overreach of epic proportions and I adore it in 2006 we were all still pretty astonished by the existence of the MP3 being able to select anything from your entire music library almost at the speed of thought was still an incredibly hot topic and the idea of being able to do it with a dedicated remote terminal like this is astounding I I mean even now really and it's done really well too it doesn't interfere with someone using the computer there's no like huge copy of Music match jukebox filling the screen it opens Windows Media Player in a hidden State and controls it via apis in fact if we go in and open the normal Windows Media Player when we go in and pick a song we can actually see that song get selected and start playing in Windows Media Player itself there's actually an updated version of the drivers that even integrates with iTunes and you know missing that on the first release in 2006 sucks pretty bad but they did at least do it eventually right this feature floors me in a way that nothing really has since the great modern stagnation began basically you know this is the stuff that we could come up with before smartphones made it all pointless I'm sure that by 202 12 you could control iTunes on your iMac using an app on an iPhone and I don't know maybe you could even do that in like 2009 but there couldn't have been many ways to do it if any in 2006 or 2007 and not like this not with a portable readable backlit screen I I mean this is simply inspired Dell stood back took a look at the problems that still hadn't been worked out with media center piecs and said we aren't going to sleep until we've nailed this as well as anyone can nail it they saw where Microsoft had left left gaps with the standard remote and they filled them honestly I wasn't joking when I said this was the real subject of the video I wasn't really sure that I had anything to say about this machine and then I saw the remote and that clinched it for me this is the m2010 this is the experience this is what media center was supposed to mean there was so much energy poured into all the marketing behind this and unlike the stuff that companies pour their marketing into now this is something everyone viscerally and enthusiastically wanted and Dell delivered on it that's the experience this machine fully converges your entire Media Center into one device integrates with your TV and your stereo whether they were New or Old and it offers a whole sliding scale of human interface options to fit whatever you want to do whether you're sitting on the couch channel surfing watching a movie or playing music while you fixed dinner Dell tried to meet you where you were literally but as it turns out they didn't even stop there magazines actually referred to this machine as the showstopper and they implied that this was actually used in Dell's marketing material so Dell clearly intended for this to be a Powerhouse and it's no surprise that the hardware specs are not half bad I figured we'll just go over those while we examine the insides of the machine I had to take it all to pieces before I could start shooting this video anyway so I recorded the whole process if you don't feel like watching that's fine just skip to the next chapter I'll summarize one of my favorite things about this machine is that it's actually pretty serviceable I expected it to be a real struggle though so on my initial attempt I over did it I started on the bottom I pulled the battery which says it's in good health by the way then I pulled the cover off the subwoofer which is of course a very funny name for a 2-in speaker and there was nothing under there except the subwoofer itself and the Bluetooth module that's it on the left the little gold squiggle there as the antenna keep that in mind that'll come up again later next I tried pulling the big access hatch that revealed the Wi-Fi card which was 80211 G of course since n wouldn't come out for a few more years then there were two Ram slots with 2 gigs of DDR3 and finally a normal CR 2032 cosos battery not some bizarre proprietary module wrapped in heat shrink but just a normal coin cell it was of course incredibly dead but it was easy to replace intriguingly there's also a spot for a second mini pcie slot but there's no socket installed I'm really curious what that might have been but the service manual says nothing about it there is an antenna cable laying there but Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are accounted for it so I have to assume this was for a cellular modem and that's all there is on the bottom there's no way to get any any further inside so at this point I realized I should probably get the service manual and as it turns out the actual disassembly procedure is much simpler than I expected and kind of clever but very obtuse you'd never figure it out on your own there are two slots on the back that look almost like Kensington locks but if you insert a screwdriver and push real hard the top plate will pop loose you then repeat this on the other side and with both plates removed you can now get to the 13 screws which hold the whole thing together removing those is very tedious but fortunately they're all the same size so you can't mix them up after removing those the top lifts off and of course you have to be careful to avoid tearing the ribbon cables but unlike some machines they're reasonably long and they unplug very easily this opens up the whole inside of the system but before we get to all that I wanted to show you this top panel CU it's kind of impressive it's all one enormous hunk of cast magnesium apparently using an alloy called az91d as per the mold stamp matte web.com says that's the most commonly used magnesium alloy so there's a fact for you the lid latches are also really overbuilt they secure the top panels with six lugs each and the Springs are really heavy this whole thing feels like an engineer Flex because plastic tabs really would have been just fine but what I really wanted to see in here was the DVD mechanism the motor here lifts and lowers the drive but what's interesting is it you can just push the drive shut and it doesn't seem to mind there's no resistance no gear Trin worrying I was curious how this was possible and it seems to be the work of this little brass Gadget here it's some kind of slip clutch if you run the motor while holding the door shut you can see the input spinning while the output stays in place and likewise if you push the door closed you can see that side spins and the motor doesn't it's a clever little component anyway setting that aside here's the machine itself you may notice that the front third is almost empty this system actually could have been shallower if not for the battery and subwoofer but otherwise everything fits together quite neatly the motherboard spans most of the machine but the ports are on little daughter boards on either side along with the battery connector now while I was getting my bearings in here I noticed something odd over on the right there's a little tiny PCB down inside here and it has one of those flat printed antennas and that seemed odd because we've already found the Bluetooth and the Wi-Fi cards and I've never seen a cellular radio with a printed antenna there's no reason this machine would have GPS so what's left I took a picture of the chip ID but I didn't figure out what it actually did for a couple of days I'll tell you about it later now when I first opened this your eyes may have been drawn to the shocking site of not just just one but two spinning hard diss certainly I wasn't expecting it it seems like Dell could have fit a 3 and 1/2 in drive in here but they instead went with a pair of 120 gig 5400 RPM 2 and 1/2 in discs now that seems pretty weird but I think I know why they did it and I'll talk about it once we're done with the rest of the hardware for now though I have to remove those drives because I'm actually in here for a reason below the hard drives are the heat sinks and those needed some help urgently in fact from what I've heard I'm lucky that my 2010 works because everywhere I've read I've heard they like to give up the ghost due to Thermal issues particularly with the graphics you may have noticed that there's two fans and heat pipes in here because this machine has an actual discrete GPU and a pretty recent one for the time a Radeon x1800 if we pop off the right side heat sink we find the graphics module underneath suffering under some very crusty and unfortunate compound I scraped off what I could then I cleaned up the GPU die but I actually left the stuff that was built up around it because I didn't want to risk ripping off a resistor and I figure none of that should affect cooling now i' hoped that this would be a desktop GPU but with the die cleaned off you can see it is in fact a Mobility version that's still pretty good for the era though as I'll be showing you shortly I applied some of my most gamer compound which ended up being some Arctic Silver 5 from like 10 years ago and I'm not sure if that'll fix The Thermals for good but hopefully it buys the machine some time I torqued the bolts back down probably in the wrong order and then I turned to the CPU Cooler that of course needed a good scraping as well but I didn't bother cleaning the CPU because I'm actually going to replace it I'm generally not one for Min maxing my old PCS I mean there were upgrades back in the day but most people just use them with the parts they came with and I usually prefer that experience for accuracy it's the same reason I don't put ssds in any of my machines it would be a totally anachronistic experience but here's the thing this machine shipped with a core Duo t2600 not a Core 2 just a plain core the original 32-bit version now that was at least a true dual core chip and it was smoking hot Tech when it came out but Dell switched to core 2s as soon as they were available and since I'd eventually like to try a 64-bit OS on this thing I decided it wouldn't be inauthentic to upgrade the CPU I did have a bit of trouble with this though earlier that day I'd pulled a Core 2 Duo t7250 out of Adele Precision so I figured I was ready to go I popped the old core chip out dropped the new Core 2 into place and it wouldn't go in I seesaw it back and forth no dice I checked for bent pins tried again no dice and then an ancient Dusty memory came rushing back to me this CPU socket isn't just yellow for the Aesthetics it actually tells us that this is Socket M the one intel was using for mobile chips in ' 06 and early ' 07 but in May 2007 they switch to socket P which is nearly identical except that it's purple and the key pin has been moved by one position so my 7250 was useless but I still had the XPS m1210 that I used back in quick start episode EP 3 it screen died during the shoot so i' planned on throwing it out but I never got around to it so I pulled that apart which was actually far more involved than opening up the m210 and I was pleased to find a core2 Duo t7200 sitting in a socket M so I pulled that out dropped it into the m210 and it went right in I pasted it up and I was ready to put everything back together I fired the machine back up and breathed the sigh of relief when it booted proving that I hadn't cracked any cores despite my fumbling and poor torque hygiene now however I had to install Windows XP and this was not as easy as you'd hope now I have installed XP on literally hundreds of dells of this vintage it was my job for a while but none of them had this kind of hard drive setup I'm sure a few people noticed this during the boot up earlier but this machine shipped with a raid array from the factory those two 120 gig drives were preconfigured in raid zero or striped which is very rare for a consumer system but I suspect I know why they did it Dell wanted to deliver a fast and responsive machine and they did this thing boots pretty quick even for the time but more importantly they wanted it to be able to record a TV broadcast while playing back another one even possibly while the machines being used for other tasks and I'm not sure if any single Drive could handle that in this era I looked up a review of a Seagate 7200 RPM drive from 2005 and the sequential Benchmark topped out at 65 megabytes per second in sequential read they didn't have a random access test but I ran Crystal disc mark on the disc array in this machine and I got about 75 mbes per second sequential I also got 35 and 45 in random access and if we assume these are proportional then the seate was probably more like 25 to 30 now was that actually insufficient for contemporary tasks I'm not sure but the point is Dell was going for high performance with this machine and while they weren't quite hype enough to throw a wd Raptor in there it seems like maybe a pair of 5400 RPM drives edged out any single consumer grade disc probably without a big leap in cost and I suspect this was more common at the time than I realized uh for for instance the Toshiba Cosmo that I reviewed in Quick Start Episode 5 which was another high-end media center laptop had two hard drive bays and it supported raid zero toshima may even have sold it preconfigured that way I think the lack of affordable ssds was just really cramping their style in high-end machines and this is just how they dealt with it at the time of course there are many potential problems with raid if I lost one of these drives I'd lose everything that sucks it's also Intel's chipset raid which I've always been told is CPU hung Ry and unreliable so was it fair of Dell to impose all this extra complexity on consumers without warning them that hey this computer is literally half as trustworthy as any other one you can buy maybe not but I don't know what else they could have done and from the users's perspective it's pretty much invisible unless it dies or they have to reinstall Windows neither of which the user would have to do themselves they would probably take it back to Dell or to a service center of some kind so it's kind of moot although it is still a huge pain in the ass for the person repairing it I admit it's been a really long time since I installed Windows XP on a RAID controller in Anger well over a decade at this point uh it was always an irritating process cuz XP came with very few storage drivers built in and the way raid controllers show up to your OS was completely non-standard at this time uh the same goes for early SATA controllers as well so with any of those if you wanted to install XP you had to get a set of drivers on a floppy disc it had to be a floppy no USB no CD nothing a floppy disc and feed that to the setup program and then like six times out of 10 it just wouldn't work for some reason you'd have to dick around with it for hours and that's exactly what happened to me I spent half a day working on this trying to install Windows over and over and over and every time it just said there were no hard drives present and this was with Dell's own install media like the exact version that would have come with this PC so I was getting pretty frustrated it wasn't until I slept on it and came back in the morning that I remembered people telling me that xp's raid support was just broken that no matter what you do it'll never actually install the drivers properly even if I'd gotten it to recognize the raid it would have done the first half of the install and then rebooted and immediately crashed the only solution according to everybody is to slipstream the drivers to integrate them into the disc image using a tool like nlight and then they'll work both during and after setup so I had to burn like three different discs before I managed to find the right driver but in the end I got it working windows installed and it's been smooth sailing ever since now I can't be sure but I think that if ID used Vista I would have had easier time of this but as I said the machine came with Windows XP and using the original software was important to me so I put in the effort and I figured I'd just share in case you ever want to do this yourself so that's mostly it for the under the hood stuff but there is one other subject that I've been glossing over no pun intended that's uh the way this thing looks it's not amazing you've probably seen some hair and dust stuck to it this is despite my best efforts I've wiped this thing down multiple times during this shoot but barely makes any difference because of course Dell mummified it in soft touch rubber this is what it looks like after I cleaned it up when I got this thing the whole machine looked like a wad of duct tape there was grit and dirt glued to every inch of the surface but the fortunate thing about this is that it usually comes off if you put in some effort the unfortunate thing is it's a lot of effort there was so much of this stuff it was absolutely everywhere and none of the surfaces are flat so it was just incredibly tedious I started by applying some paper towels soaked in isopropyl alcohol and after a minute of soaking I was able to scrape off about 2/3 of the stuff with a plastic knife that felt satisfying but that remaining third was a nightmare I spent about 8 hours scrubbing it with paper towels and a terry cloth and I was able to remove about 90 95% of this crap but there were parts that were just impossible to get to and some of the rubber wasn't fully rotted so it wouldn't lift off that's what's going on here this is that rubber crap but it's still in its original condition and I just I have no idea how to get it off without damaging anything I actually did scuff up the screen bezel trying to get it clean and that's when I called it quits so the result is not perfect by any means but it's far less revolting than it was when I got it so I have to put this in the W column anyway that's it for the disassembly uh for anyone who skipped it the hardware summary is as follows this shipped with a core Duo t2600 and 2 gigs of DDR3 but I upgraded those to a Core 2 Duo t7200 and4 gigs so I can run Vista comfortably later on those are actually accurate specs for the 2007 version of this machine it also has 802 111g Wi-Fi Bluetooth and some mysterious unknown radio board a secret tool we'll talk about later then there's a Radeon Mobility x1800 GPU and two 120 gig 5400 RPM 2 1/2 in drives set up in raid Zero from the factory now by the standards of the time this was not going to put alien wear's desktop division out of business but for a portable machine it was pretty respectable I mean alienware's laptops were still more impressive but only because they had dual gpus in SLI otherwise they were mostly shipping rebranded cleos with single core AMD tyon CPUs the m2010 was sold with fairly high-end Hardware especially after the Core 2 refresh so it's pretty clear that Dell intended this as a gaming machine now I don't usually bother testing much in the way of games in my videos but I'm usually looking at machines that are more business or multimedia focused here though we definitely want to see this thing deliver now CET said that this Ran halflife 2 episode 1 at a consistent frame rate and I don't know what that means but I won't be double cheing because it requires steam which no longer runs on XP and while you can work around this it is a huge pain and I don't want to do it but I did try their other choice prey 2006 and I'm not sure I got the same results that they did at Full Resolution it struggled to reach 30 FPS and even after I turned it down to 1024 x 768 and put everything on minimum I had a hard time getting even the opening bathroom scene to do much better than that now I admit that back in these days I probably would have considered an uneven 30fps to be pretty killer performance and the Doom 3 engine in particular was kind of a miserable unoptimized mess that doesn't even feel smooth on Hardware from 2024 but it was still a bit of a disappointment it did get me thinking though back in the day I didn't play a lot of cutting edge stuff I actually hated a lot of the Triple A titles of this era so I picked a game I actually remember enjoying 2004's Duke Nukem Manhattan Pro project in retrospect I'm not sure why I liked it it's very simplistic it's a like a Newgrounds Flash game with a rudimentary Third Dimension and I couldn't actually figure out how to get through the first level even after like 20 minutes but it does run like gang busters at a constant 60 FPS so this goes in the win column I then installed Sirius Sam's second encounter that game's even older it's from 2002 but I was still playing it at the time so here it is it runs like a million bucks rarely less than 70 FPS and frequently well over 150 it was getting 15 frames per second at first but that turned out to be a weird multi-core CPU bug from there I turned to a nantex review of the desktop x1800 to see what was hot at the time I learned that apparently this was ati's first card with Shader Model 3 which let it run Splinter Cell Chaos Theory at full detail so I tried that and well it did run but uh not nearly as well as it would have on the desktop version I think I had to turn a lot of things off and run it at 1024 by 768 to get something remotely usable and it actually looks smoother on camera than it did in real life this really felt very shaky and nothing I did seemed to improve it Far Cry on the other hand actually did great at full resolution with everything on Max it looked like I was getting 60 FPS or better most of the time there is some very noticeable stuttering but that didn't seem to be a GPU limitation since decreasing the settings didn't help any I honestly wonder if running it on Vista might have helped in any case though I think this machine would have delivered a perfectly satisfactory Far Cry experience by most people's standards my final test was Battlefield 2 and I don't have much to say about that I was able to run it at full resolution on medium settings pretty much fine so I think this machine passes the test for Mid 2000s competive multiplayer gaming but it mostly just reminded me how much I don't miss Battlefield 2 that game looks absolutely Dreadful enemy helicopter spotted so I didn't try out everything I could think of I kind of wish I'd tried fear in particular but this was a good slice of contemporary popular titles and mostly it just reminded me how much I don't miss that era of gaming but this machine did handle them better than I expected not as well as I'd hoped though in fact if you really wanted a smooth experience you might have just been better off playing the games that came with media center I don't remember these being included maybe they're Dell packin but it turns out there's two surprisingly Charming casual games in here one called Autos magic blocks [Music] and another called gem Master which I expected to be a bed knockoff but it's more of a poop [Applause] [Music] pop but neither of those require a GPU so Dell surely intended for people to play 3D games on this and for the price t bag which was of course well over $44,000 it really seems like they could have delivered a better experience I question whether this really needed to be a Mobility card I feel like the chassis has the room for a full-size GPU and the space to cool it and if Dell was hoping for this to be you know the family computer in the living room that's used for games when nobody's watching TV then a desktop card would have sold that a lot harder but I suspect that they didn't go that way mostly because it wouldn't have done very well on battery so the battery it's the weirdest thing about this machine by far I'm not sure what Dell was picturing anybody doing with it I mean that's not to say I can't picture anything for instance I took it to a park I set it on a picnic table I tuned in some local TV and I watched it for over an hour on a single charge which is astonishing for a 20-year-old battery especially since I was stress testing it contemporary reviews site numbers like 3 hours of runtime under normal use and we don't know what that means but I could believe that they meant TV or movie watch watching since that's what this thing was built to do so Dell didn't just put a battery in here they put a good one in it nonetheless Hardware Zone put together this delightful chart which graphs runtime to weight ratio on an enormous variety of laptops and the m2010 scored the absolute worst by a significant margin the machine does after all weigh 18 lb almost 9 kg this is a completely absurd weight for a laptop but of course it isn't one it's a port portable computer and those used to weigh 30 lb on average so the m2010 is really a featherweight for what it is lugging it from place to place isn't the most pleasant experience but you aren't supposed to take it into Starbucks I mean you can and it actually works a lot better than you'd think but I doubt it's what Dell [Music] intended but where did they intend this to go it's a good question probably not actually a park because the screen is basically a mirror and it's not terribly bright I know I said it was pretty nice but only by 2006 standards this is still just a ccfl backlight so it's usable indoors but only with a bright image on the screen dark low contrast video is really tough to see even under household lighting and I found that most games were unplayable unless I pumped the gamma so Outdoors TV viewing isn't really on the table I mean it is literally on the table but you can't see what it's doing there one thing I can imagine that holds some water is Media portability in an era before streaming given that you'd notionally record TV on this thing it's one way to cart your backlog of Gray's Anatomy to a friend's house before the days of Plex and while the array of video outputs will let you plug into just about anything they might have had the screen is big enough that you could also just plunk it down on a coffee table and use it as is without having to mess with your friend's TV wiring but that still doesn't fully explain the purpose of the battery the only thing I can think of is that it serves as a kind of mic UPS if you do have it in a precarious spot like the middle of a living room it wouldn't do to have someone trip over a power cord but if that happens here you just get yourself untangled and plug it back in no harm done but I can't imagine that's what D was picturing I think I get why they made the machine this big why they developed the novel peripherals why they put so many ins and outs on it why it has two hard drives I can see the arguments for all of these strange things but this one element I just don't get I can see some weird EDG cases where it might be convenient but they're nerd this isn't stuff that would justify to a normal consumer compromising the rest of the machine just to accommodate it I think this machine would make a lot more sense as an ordinary all-in-one with a desktop CPU and a GPU that just happens to have a carrying handle built in so as is usually the big question in my videos how did this happen well to me this feels like the product of a Skunk Works an internal team given free reign to produce whatever they wanted no matter how outlandish or expensive as long as it made Dell look like Innovative Market leaders this is for what it's worth the environment that produced the original IBM PC so it's a venerable idea Sony must have been doing it all the time what with the non-stop parade of weird Vios they put out many of which couldn't possibly have been responses to Market Research or Focus testing someone just had an idea a vision and they were allowed to make it reality with very little oversight and I think that's what happened here juicero style flexes like the huge aluminum monitor arm and the massively overbuilt top panel latch suggest a blank check was involved somewhere but honestly I can't decide if this design really is completely out of left field or if it's all the way at the other end a Homer Simpson bubble car that combines every imaginable consumer request into a compromise of Epic Proportions it has to be high power and big enough to see from across the room and it has to play games but it also has to be portable and run off a battery and be fully controllable from the kitchen and so on and so forth I think overall the result is impress Rive but if I have a specific criticism it's that it's doing so much that you can miss some of the real Innovations I call this the curse of the concept car let's go back to this remote control for a moment this thing is intriguing this was made under contract by gyration who went on to sell it themselves as the air music remote with a slightly different aesthetic slightly different button layout and a standalone USB receiver but it didn't get released until 2 years later and I can't really see any reason for that you see I actually have the gyration version of this remote I bought this because I couldn't find the Dell one with a receiver on eBay but as I learned this is because the Dell ones didn't have a receiver they work with one that's built into the m2010 it's that weird unidentified radio board that we found that chip was a cyw USB 6934 that's a wireless USB controller and it does exactly what it says on the tin it's literally just USB over radio this was brand new technology at the time uh and it only survived until about 2009 for some reason I have no idea why it failed because while it was around it got used in a few things that I own and it seems to work just fine we saw it back in Quick Start Episode 6 it's how the Dell Latitude Z 600's Wireless dock worked and I could run USB devices audio and display link video up to like 25 ft off of it so it seems like a solid technology I'm not really sure what happened there at any rate though the remote is able to have all the functionality that I showed you earlier because it is just a USB device there's just a radio in between it and the USB port I wasn't able to work out where this appeared in the device tree but I'm sure it's a composite of several hid interfaces the weird thing about this though is that the gyration branded version seems to be the exact same thing the USB receiver has the exact same chip in it it just won't work with the Dell remote and vice versa now obviously they could have firmware differences but I don't see why that should matter wireless USB was a standard so both of these should speak the same language presumably there were no real differences they just deli locked this to the Dell receiver because they wanted the remote to be an exclusive feature of the m2010 I think that Dell themselves designed this remote then had gyration build it with a 2-year exclusivity agreement so people couldn't look past the computer that they'd put so much work into and just buy the remote itself to it this actually happened people realized that they could buy the Dell receiver boards wire them up to USB cables and then use the remotes with normal PCS so they did and it seems like once Dell noticed a curious rise in and the sale of spare parts they took the receivers off their website but I think this concern made sense because this remote is not really a product it's an integral component of the m2010 it's not just something gyration was working on that Dell licensed I think Dell actually commissioned it from them and I have two facts supporting this first there's the screen when I held this thing up and showed off the media center interface you probably thought to yourself wow Dell just shamelessly ripped off the iPod UI didn't they but that's probably not true this interface is actually closer to that of the Dell Digital Jukebox a series of MP3 players Dell sold for several years which were in turn developed by creative based on their own jukebox series and from a legal perspective that's the real origin of the iPod interface at least per the settlement Apple reached with creative in 2006 now regardless of whether creative really had the right side of that dispute there's no way that gyration would have developed this on their own in that legal atmosphere Dell on the other hand probably had the rights to the creative UI via their existing partnership so they went to gyration and said just put our media player interface right into the thing and that's what they did or more accurately it's what d2m design did this is our second piece of the puzzle these are the people who actually designed the air music remote and per their website they designed it in collaboration with gyration for Dell specifically to pair with the m2010 which we now learn was once code named the media Mogul I found that term used elsewhere so if you had any doubt that this was a multimedia a focused machine that should put it to bed they also outright state that they cloned the Wiimote and that was probably safer than you'd think since gyration was patting gyro controllers almost 15 years before Nintendo but I degress here's what I'm driving at I had never heard of the gyration air music before like I said I've never seen an ad for it and it doesn't seem like a lot sold there are very few on eBay even fewer with receivers included and if mine is any indication those that are out there probably don't work anymore and this is both sad and strange because for from the feature set I have expected this to sell like hot cakes even in 2008 I don't think this model looks quite as good as Dell's but that hardly matters the functionality is amazing and clearly people were excited enough to go out of their way to scam them out of Dell on top of that this one even has enhanced functions it supports controlling more devices over IR so it really seems like lots of Home Theater enthusiasts would have gone nuts for this thing if they knew it existed and that makes me think that they just didn't Dell didn't sell or even advertise their remote because while they came up with a brilliant product that enthusiasts would have loved it wasn't really a product it was a component of a machine sold as an experience a package deal and one that almost no Enthusiast would have wanted so maybe Dell let gyration keep the trimmings after they were done with this pork chop but since they didn't have anywhere near the marketing clout I think it just died on the vine and that's the curse of the concept car a company puts together a product that's not really something they ever intend to make it's just there to get coverage in the media and make them look clever and Innovative Lexus makes a car with a heads up display and thermal imaging and all this other wild stuff but the real hero feature is that it can turn into a boat and that's obviously absurd I mean yes they can make one they have a Skunk Works produce a prototype they show it driving into a lake it really is doing it but obviously they're never going to mass-produce that you'll see a couple TV ads you'll get linked to a YouTube video and then they crush the prototypes into into cubes and throw them into a volcano and the heads up display and the thermal imaging go with it they're trapped in the amphibia sports car they will probably go down with the ship any idea that's invented as part of a publicity stunt is likely to Live and Die in that stunt and I think that's what happened to this remote it may have been made by Dell but that doesn't mean that Dell's normal computer division had any access to it once the m2010 finished its run the whole thing went into some dusty Vault never to see the light of day again and we can probably say the same thing about several other aspects of this machine I wish that Dell had gone harder with the detachable keyboard for instance this thing is really neat and they could have included it with more conventional all-in-one machines still using the docking system so you don't have to keep putting new batteries in it but with full travel keys and a normal layout I also think the uh dual articulated hinge is pretty cool and this could have scaled to other machines but it didn't really show up again in anything else for years and wasn't made nearly as well when it finally did and the highquality sound system this could have fit into a lot of other machines I find it more impressive than any other laptop speaker system I've ever heard but all this got trapped in the m2010 which is albeit an impressive accomplishment and a solid product nonetheless one that only a small sliver of the market was ever going to make room for in their lives it's a concept car that got put into production and that's always kind of a tragedy I mean if we want to talk about missing the trees for the forest the funniest thing about this machine is that you can get so distracted by All The Punchy features and wild design choices that you can completely miss the fact that it actually has a quick start OS how's that for a late reveal not much of one though because we've actually seen this before if you haven't watch the quick start series which I recommend it's my best work by far I'll just summarize in the mid 2000s a bunch of system vendors started delivering dual boot PCS to Consumers where the primary OS was Windows but the second OS was something much smaller like a stripped down copy of Linux so that theoretically the machine could boot up faster if you weren't planning on doing anything more involved than playing a movie or looking at email the whole joke of the series though is that few or none of these Solutions really worked they either didn't improve startup time or not enough to matter or they were just so useless that there was no point and this one's all three it's called Dell media direct and it's a clone of Windows Media Center made by CyberLink I covered this in Quick Start Episode 3 and that was really the dumbest entry in the series because this isn't even really a second OS it's XP embedded that's right Dell shipped two different copies of Windows XP on the same machine so as you'd expect it takes almost exactly the same amount of time to boot rendering this all utterly pointless and since the software isn't actually Windows Media Center half the features are missing you can't watch live TV for instance to its credit since the wireless USB remote doesn't need drivers to function it actually does work here on Dell's other machines with media direct you just had to use the keyboard but that's all moot since you never use this on purpose my guess is that Dell just included it because well technically this is is an XPS laptop and at this time all of those were getting media direct but including it on the machine that shipped with striped hard drives probably the fastest boot time in their entire product range is really just a cherry on top reminding us that no Corporation can go 10 minutes without making a really dumb decision but in conclusion I still like the m2010 it's pretty well built and I think that the very specific audience that it targeted would have loved it I never would have been in that audience but I think it did exist it's somebody with a house much prettier and cleaner than mine with a lot more empty surfaces that they can park things like this on I think people who can live like that would have adored this thing I mean to it I picked it up from somebody who said their dad had only just stopped using it and was sad to see it go now I do admit that I'm being generous here I'm sugar coating where I'm not cherry picking I I know the machine is a bit sillier than I'm giving it credit for but isn't this what we want to see for the corporations that we depend on for all of our stuff however involuntarily to just sometimes let some artists make a strange thing just in case it hits our particular needs I know there's someone watching who would love to own one of these if it had an i5 forth gen in it but honestly if you just wanted a fancy video player for a small bedroom these apparently did start shipping with Blu-ray drives a bit later on so with Windows 7 and an updated Media Center I bet you could get a pretty nice Blu-ray and TV viewing experience out of this thing even now I won't be testing that though because this video is long enough already so thank you for sticking with me I know that was a lot but I realized that if I didn't cover this my way nobody was going to if you enjoyed this video then consider subscribing to my channel so I know you're into this sort of thing maybe turn on notifications if you want to find out when I upload new things but if you really want to help me out then consider subscribing to my patreon like these folks here my entire budget for weird stuff like this comes from viewers like you I haven't seen one of these things in the wild since about 2009 so when this one popped up I just had to grab it at the sticker price no time for bartering or bargaining so I paid more than I wish I had for it but thanks to my patrons I could do that so I'm incredibly grateful to all of them for making this possible I can't thank you all enough and everyone else thanks for watching

Channel: Cathode Ray Dude - CRD

Views: 205,467

Keywords: technology, retroelectronics, CRD

Id: OO5hYhdxIuk

Length: 67min 13sec (4033 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2024