Dell d420 advice needed

Anyone any experience with a Dell d420? Got one and it is taking about 10secs to load up the likes of MS Word. Have a Intel Centrino Duo 1.06 and in addition to the integrated 512mb, have an additional 512 mb. Would increasing the ram by another 512mb make a difference? Is there something up with this system? Any good places to run diagnostics? Help!!!#


Thanks

D

 

What OS(operating System-VIsta or XP)?

Yes you want at least 1 gb of memory for both XP and Vista(some recommend 2gb for vista).
you will most defiantly notice a improvements in startup time of many apps and maybe the overall speed of laptop(it will feel faster)

 

operating system is just xp

have 1gb of ram, if you include the d420 integrated ram and the additional 512mb. Not really sure what the difference is between integrated ram and the other 512mb. Can i add another 2gb?

 

you can upgrade to 1.5gb. You might have only 1 slot(the only 512 is non removable-most likley soldered on the motherboard) available to upgrade so you can only do 1.5 gb(change the 512mb to a 1gb)

What version of Microsoft office do you have?

 

I am running office xp on the system.

Thanks for all your help by the way.

 

Any other advice would be much appreciated.

 

Yes the motherboard has 512mb built on to the motherboard. I ordered a 2gb stick for mine but the notebook will only recognize 2GB of RAM. So even though it has 512mb on the MB + a 2GB stick..I only see 2GB in Windows. My advice is find a 1GB stick for cheap to give you a total of 1.5GB.

Are any of you experiencing some serious heat issues with your D420's? I wonder if your poor performance could be thermal throttling. Mine was running hotter then the fires of hell so I had to do some serious surgery on it just to keep it running below 70c. I am really upset with the way dell chose to cool this laptop. I took it apart and the CPU heatsink does not even make contact with the CPU(they use that crappy purple thermal spacer stuff they use on the chipsets). Never seen anything like it in all my computer building days. I had to find a piece of aluminum just the right thickness for a spacer between the CPU and heatsink. Then I lapped the aluminum spacer so it was perfectly flat on both sides and used Arctic Ceramique on both sides of the spacer. Had to rip the laptop down to its bare motherboard but at least now it runs at usable(but still un-impressive) temps. With its ultra low voltage CPU it should run colder than my other Dells. Not 25 degrees hotter!! The bottom was getting so hot that it would almost burn my leg.

Hey Dell.....they're called LAPTOPS!!!!!!!! In other words, we use these dam things on our laps.

 

SO i need to find a 1gb stick of ram and you think that will make a difference?

 

Maybe. It is a good place to start. You will enjoy that extra memory regardless. Maybe a fresh install would help as well.

Does it get very hot on the bottom?

 

no it doesn't really get that hot to be honest. The notebook is not that old and there is not much software on it either. I think I am just used to working on faster machines and this appears to be that bit slower than my Pentium 4 3.00ghz Desktop and my other Dell laptop which has the core dou 1.6ghz processor. All machines have the same amount of memory 1gb. So maybe by boosting this one up to 1.5gb, some change will happen!

Fingers crossed or has anyone got a better idea?

 

That's interesting that yours runs cool and mine didn't. I feel kinda cheated LOL. I went with a solid state drive to even the odds on my 420. I also did a fresh install with windows XP. I tried vista first but this computer just doesn't have the power for Vista. Also, download NHC and lock it in at 1.2ghz. I was able to turn the voltage all the way down so temps aren't any higher even with speedstep disabled. That speedstep does seem to slow things down even though everyone says it shouldn't. Other then that I don't really know what else you can do outside of ebay it and get an XPS.

 

If you are using Vista buy a fast SD card and use ReadyBoost. Should help. When I had my D420 I found apps loaded much faster with ReadyBoost enabled. The hard drive is really slow on the D420.

Also with RAM so cheap I would go for 1.5GBs of ram.

 

Does it boot up really fast with the solid state drive?

Surely 1.2 and 1.06GHz can't make that much differnce in heat. FIgured the solid state drive would cool things off too, even though the normal hd is only 4200rpm.

I'd like to hear more d420 owners' input on heat.

 

Yeah the solid state certainly boots up faster but still not as fast as it could thanks too dell. I figured out that it boots up in the lowest speedstep setting. Reason I think this is because if you disable speedstep in the bios, which locks the cpu in at its lowest speed, then it doesn't change boot up time even by 1 second. This is a Dell special since every other motherboard I've seen, when you disable speedstep the lock the CPU in at the fastest speed rather then the slowest. I'm trying to stay open minded about Dell computers but I keep seeing this kind of crap all the time with Dell notebooks. Kind of irritating to think they have the already slow than tar d420 underclocked to an even slower 800mhz for bootup. My advice is to stay away from the d420. I like my d410 better then my d420.

 

I've got a D420. I love this laptop.

While I do think extra RAM is a good idea, I do not think it will help with speeding up the launching of MS Word. I believe the culprit is the 4200 RPM hard drive. It simply takes longer to launch larger applications like MS Word, Photoshop, etc.

However... once the program is launched I find the D420 to be plenty fast -- just as fast as my Inspiron 6000 laptop. So if you can deal with waiting longer for a program to launch, the D420 is a great little computer. If you can't deal with that, you might be better off with a laptop that uses a faster hard drive.

By the way, my D420 has a 1.20 GHz Duo processor and 1.5 GBs of RAM.

 

One more thing -- I just noticed that MS Excel opens VERY quickly (less than a second).

MS Word must be a beefier program.

 

The windows loading isnt too dependent on the CPU...it is really hard drive limited. I found my old D420 fast enough for most work. In fact compare it to my current tablet I cant tell much difference. Again use Readyboost, it will help.

Also I suggest people who use the D420 on the desk alot get the Mediabase. The Mediabase can be had for like $50 on ebay and its well worth it.

 

Is it possible to upgrade the hard disk? Is it worth it?

I find that opening Word by itself is pretty quick, it is when I am opening up a document on the desktop that it tend to take a bit longer. Docs are that big in size either, kb at max