Digital Archaeology: Gateway M250XL

Gateway was my favorite producer of computers in the 1990s and early 2000s. I never bought a new laptop from them but I did get a couple of desktops over the years including a 486 model in 1993 and a Pentium II model in 1997.

I'm not sure when Gateway's quality started to decline. I think it was probably around the Pentium IV era. They no longer stood out as exceptional machines as they once did.

As I recall, their laptops were pretty nice too, at least during the early days with the Solo line. This particular model, the Gateway M250(XL?) was released in 2005 so it's from quite a bit later than the Solo line. It doesn't seem to be a bad machine but it doesn't really stand out from the crowd either. Still, it's probably as good as most laptops of the time outside of high end workstations and gaming machines.

The M250 line was first introduced in June 2005 and featured three models:

1. The M250S which was a low-end version featuring a 1.4GHz Celeron M 360 CPU, 256MB of DDR2 RAM and a 40GB hard drive for $849.99
2. The M250E a middle of the road model pushed for education and business use that featured a 1.6GHz Pentium M CPU, 256MB of DDR2 RAM and a 40GB hard drive for $1,269.00.
3. The top of the line (at least for this model range) M250XL which featured a 1.87GHz Pentium M CPU, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive.

This particular model features a 2.0GHz Pentium M, 2GB of DDR2 RAM and an 80GB hard drive. I assume that this is a slighly later refresh of the M250XL.

This model features the following:

• Processor: Pentium M 760 @ 2.00 GHz
• RAM: 2 GB DDR2
• Video: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express
• Screen: 17-inch 1280x768

You can see more detailed specs here.

I would say that this laptop was a mid-range model. Compared to it's larger brother, the 680XL, this laptop is a bit more limited. It has many similarities, including a similar CPU and design. It is a smaller, more portable laptop but the smaller screen has a lower resolution. That and the lack of a dedicated graphics chip are probably the most significant differences.

The CPU is a 2.00 GHz Pentium M 760. This is one of the fastest Pentium M CPUs. It generally matches the speed or comes close to the fastest Core Solo CPUs as well.

As mentioned above, this laptop does not include a dedicated graphics chip. Instead it relies on the integrated graphics of the Intel 915GM chipset. While this of course is more than sufficient to drive the 14-inch 1280x768 display for most typical tasks, it's not so great for games or other graphically intensive apps.

In more modern usage, there are two drawbacks. First, having a 32-bit CPU is increasingly becoming a liability. Earlier versions of Windows 10 supported 32-bit CPUs for instance. However, later versions of Windows 10 dropped support for 32-bit CPUs and Windows 11 only supports 64-bit CPUs. In addition, most linux distributions have dropped support for 32-bit CPUs. This laptop is currently running Debian 10.

The other main drawback is limited RAM. This laptop probably shipped with 512MB and has since been upgraded to 2GB. However, I believe that this is the max amount of RAM that this laptop can handle. Even though there is at least one modern version of Linux still being released in a 32-bit version, you really want a full 4GB if possible.

So while it is still possible to use this machine in a modern environment, it probably works best as a retro machine. It was originally designed for Windows XP and while the lack of a dedicated GPU makes it not the best choice for retrogaming, there's still plenty of older games you could play on it.

This laptop is also not quite yet too old to run BOINC projects though options are becoming more limited. Fewer and fewer projects support 32-bit CPUs. Still, this machine is receiving work from four projects. Those projects include Einstein@home, Asteroids@home, Rosetta@home, and World Community Grid. You can check out its overall stats at FreeDC or BOINCStats.

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