Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
Greetings - my 1520 finally arrived at COB Speicher after three impatient weeks of waiting. I am very, very happy with it - although I was worried after reading many posts here on NBR. The 1440x900 LCD (LPL) is bright, has zero defects and the colors are beautiful. The 160-Gb Hitachi/7200 is very fast - much "snappier" than the 5400 on my ASUS F3T.
I shrank the C: partition on Vista and installed XP on the resulting 60-Gb partition. One caveat here is I slip-streamed ICH8M drivers onto a (legal) existing copy of XP beforehand (Thanks to NBR for slip-streaming instructions - from Orev I believe).
Since Vista was on first, I had to use a Vista Anytime Upgrade DVD to repair the Vista boot manager, then I used EasyBCD to get the boot choice screen to appear. No major problems with XP drivers downloaded from Dell - although it took some tweaking to get the sound to work on XP due to the MS UAA business. No hissing or any other undesired sounds in headphones in either Vista or XP.
The 8600GT is great although I have only installed on older game in XP so far. The Alpine White finish on the lid is, and this will sound hokey, stunning - it is absolutely beautiful (but unfortunately it looks scratchable). No marks or scratches anywhere on the system (something H-P needs to correct)
There are two downsides - both of which I knew up-front - the LCD latch has a lot of slack in it when the LCD is closed and one of the RAM slots is under the keyboard. I put a one-Gb stick of Crucial RAM in it ($35-ish) and Vista runs like a top on 1.5-Gb. Overall - the 1520 is the most pleasing laptop I have owned yet - I am thrilled with it. Kudos to Dell!
Inspiron 1520 Mini-Review
Discussion in 'Dell' started by JellyGeo, Nov 16, 2007.
