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Interested in buying a new laptop

6

6885P5H

Experienced Member
Joined
Feb 7, 2015
Messages
320
Location
Québec, Canada
Hello.

I need to watch MP4 videos for work I'm doing. I'd like to watch them on a laptop but unfortunately mine is not powerful enough to play them, so I'd like to get a new one. I don't have a lot of hope that I'll be able to find one within a reasonable amount of time, but what I'd like to get is a Pentium 4. Is that CPU powerful enough to play MP4 (H.264, 640x480 resolution) videos?
 
Stone said:
I have a Dell Inspiron 9300 with a 1.60GHz Pentium CPU and it runs MP4s fine.
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I did not know those Dell. They're not what I'm looking for.

Trixter said:
Yes, but literally any laptop made in the last 4 years, no matter the price, can also play those. Why limit yourself to a P4 laptop?
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Laptops are expensive and relatively hard to acquire, so if I'm to get a new one, I want it to be good. My current laptop has a disk drive, 4:3 screen, line-in, parallel, serial and PS/2 port. If I got something without those features it would feel like a downgrade.
 
In my unfiltered opinion Pentium 4 laptops were uniformly terrible products. Because of the fundamental thermal and power constraints of the Netburst core cramming one into a laptop meant it either had to be a brick with terrible battery life and constantly running fans, or it meant inadequate cooling and drastic CPU throttling.

If by "MP4" video you mean h.264 encoding then I think you'll probably find that too much for most Pentium 4 laptops to handle. Not only will the CPU throttling kill you, most video chipsets from that era don't offer acceleration for it. If you *really* have to have legacy ports built into the laptop some early Pentium M laptops came with them, they're better on battery and perform a little more consistently than most Pentium 4 laptops, but I still think you're likely to be disappointed by anything less than a Core Duo for MP4. And off the top of my head I can't name one of those with legacy ports. (Doesn't mean they don't exist, I just don't know of any.)
 
Dell Latitude D630 was a Core2 Duo laptop with serial port but no parallel port. I think some of the Dell and Thinkpad docking stations had parallel, serial, and PS/2 ports even much later. I just checked the Sandybridge era docking station from Dell and it has a parallel, serial, both PS/2 ports plus VGA and DVI outputs.

A lot of options without being saddled with the likely to fail soon Pentium 4 laptop.
 
I don't recommend the Latitude D620/630 series, they were awful laptops.

They were some of the first to be subject to ROHS solder and had extremely high failure rates, especially the ones with Nvidia GPUs, which were subject to high failure rates themselves. The package often had VIA failures and bond wire breakages so even reballing or reflowing them with a rework station wouldn't fix them.

They also have bugged BIOS fan curves, which keeps the fans off until the CPU is basically thermonuclear before turning them on low. You have to use a 3rd party tool which only works on Windows XP. Later versions of Windows don't allow unsigned drivers without putting them in debug/developer mode or using a 32 bit version.

I'm not sure what the spec of your current laptop is, but I'd recommend a Compaq NC6320 if you want a 4:3 screen and a more powerful CPU. The Latitude D610 is also good if you need a high resolution screen, they had an optional SXGA screen which was 4:3 that had a resolution of 1400x1050 with a Mobility Radeon X300. It has a weaker Pentium M though, but you can run the fastest chip in it which I think is a Pentium M 780 at 2.2 GHz.
 
Does it really have to be a laptop? A RaspberryPi and just about any TV in the world would do this.
 
I agree with you on the D620 but I've had very little trouble (knock on wood) with the D630. The D620 with the Nvidia video are very prone to bad solder joints. Easy fix but not really worth the trouble,
 
Wasn't clear in the context of the original post if these were just old videos you need to watch, but just wanted to note that newer videos have begun to be released as h265. Just wanted to mention that since you're going to go out buying a device specifically for this, that if you're going to pay for an older device you should probably just spend the bare minimum needed because you might need to replace it in the next year or so if the content you need to view changes (or spend more now for a device capable of playing h265).

I agree with KC9UDX that a raspberry pi 3/4 and a cheap thriftstore lcd would get you h.264 decoding for the cheapest amount possible (basically under $50). I believe the pi4 does h.265 decoding, but i'm not clear how well or reliable that is, or if you need one of the more expensive versions for that. Would need to research.
 
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Even a Pi 2 will work if for some reason you can find one cheaper. (I don't think an original Pi will) I'm looking at one doing this job right now. Literally any TV of any type that you can get your hands on will work. The one I'm looking at uses DVI. I've got another that uses HDMI, and two that are 40 and 50 years old using $5 RF modulators. I've got one doing this plugged into the BNC composite input of a Video Toaster.
 
Cheap tablets are made to run videos like that and most people have 4 core or better call phone that can watch video as well. If you want a laptop specifically and want all the old ports then things get limited.
 
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