Hardware Choice

[EssexMame]

I've acquired an old DELL laptop (the screen is broken) and am looking to use it for my cabinet PC. I was hoping to get the opinion of the experts on its suitability.

It is a Dell Inspiron 1525, 1.6 GHz dual. 2Gb RAM DDR2 SDRAM, 120Gb hard disk.

An issue I do see is its Vista. I have the disks and have done a clean reinstall but XP seems to be the preferred choice for cabinets. Will it run mala/mame without issues? Will I be able to 'hide' it - I've seen XP and made progress on this but don't know if its done/so easy with Vista.

So, it's no beast, but it tops the single core desktop (an HP RP5000 [2Ghz celeron; 1Gb Ram (did I upgrade to 2?) and a decent size (200Gb) but slow disk] which is designed for retail use - till and so on - quiet but heavy and clunky) I was planning on using.

The DELL has (or would appear to have) good enough onboard graphics capabilities for the HLSL scanline setup (which I like the look of on my main PC) and being a laptop it's nice and quiet and should need less/no cabinet cooling.

Of course, the broken screen is no bother but is it possible to remove it without damaging the laptop so it's at least always using the cabled monitor and yet you can still access the on switch and keyboard/mouse when necessary.

What do people think it will be capable of, mame wise? I'm aware it will run the old classics but what sort of game/era will it be capable of going on from them? I would love Tekken but no chance. some of the later driving (Daytona) and M2 emulator perhaps?