My Inspiron 1520 Review

I had this pc delivered on the 14th, and have been useing it almost nonstop for a good few days, specs are in the sig below.

I got the jet black colour, which looks rather nice, coupled with the silver interior and black bottom. the outside feels a little plasticy for my liking, but i have no doubts so far about its build quality.

at the front you have the general media hotkeys, for controlling sound and audio applications. by default i use Itunes for music and gomplayer for videos.

I first boot it up (Bios on here is A04, by the way), got to the desktop, only to reset it again... it took about 30seconds to powerdown, and 2minutes and 33 seconds to boot up.
you can see in the first picture below what a user is faced with after the booting sequence. I let it idle for a few minutes to show the CPU usage while idle.

You can also see GPU-Z displaying information about the GFX card + stock driver, the My Computer screen split into two partitions and how much free space is left as standard (ignore drive F: Media, thats one of my externals).

this computer also completes superpi in 1minute and 9 seconds.

Using stock settings and not installing anything, you can see the windows experience index rates this computer 4.6, bottlenecked by the gfx for desktop performance.

As soon as i done all this, i formatted the notebook, reinstalling windows vista + media direct (dells little program).

find further details in my next post.

 

Post Format Review

After formatting the notebook, which may i say was dead easy due to a thread on this forum, i found booting times decreased dramatically... the 2min+ wait turned into roughly 40seconds, (although its closer to a minute as i have been installing some software on it now).

As soon as it was formatted i installed SP1 and any drivers not picked up by vista (webcam, microphone, wifi), also upgraded to the latest nvidia drivers from Laptopvideo2go.com, and was good to go.

first thing i noticed was my WEI went up, both the GFX options went up by 0.1, as seen in the picture below, not much of a boost, but probably due to new drivers or sp1. i also done everything in the speed up vista thread, and defraged with JKDefrag (which i highly recommend).

below you can see superpi has knocked a minute off the time and done it in 22seconds (how the hell did it get 1minute19seconds before there is also alot less processes that have been activated?

also, in the new hd tune picture, you can see it performs the same, although the cpu useage is conciderably lower (less bloat in background).

below also is just a plain picture of my desktop as it is when it boots, the sidebar gadgets that i currently use, my rocketdock apps, and the startmenu.
up at the top, it spybot search an destroy, windows sidebar, windows security (red as i disabled UAC), AVG anti virus, and a usb disconect thingy as i have a external HDD plugged in.

i forgot to see how much space i have after a clean reinstall, although now i have 90gigs free out of 132gigs, thanks to steam and some other new games!!!

the rest of the gigs are hiding in that media direct app that is an alternate OS that just plays media files... i will see if its any use before killing it off of my system.

now i mainly bought this system to play media and games as a desktop replacement... lets see in the next post how well current games fair...

Edit - Superpi two million picture added.

 

Gaming Review

First... WOW... this rig plays games amazingly.

first of all, ut3... ive mainly been playing this offline a little, only had a few matches.
i fraps'ed it and here are the settings... may i add that both are on the torrin map, doing veichle warfare, with 30bots (screens below at both res's)

same for COD4, amazing game, runs really well, looks great no matter what gfx settings. screens below of high/low res

Also, battleforce 2, which i thought i might add, you all know what it looks like (nothing spectacular) but at high res on the highest res here are the fraps from it.

all in all, great for games.
oh, find attached a steam stress test for CSS, gets 137ish fps.

now thats what i call performance.

under normal circumstances, i just have firefox + itunes open, this pc works great for that, i also tried to slow it down by opening openoffice writer + excel, while playing two videos on youtube, a video on gom player, utorrent, google earth, and two msn windows (one streaming voice, other webcam)... not a stutter... even it all looked great with areo 3d flip. so i think this notebook will be quite future proof for a while.

i cant really hear what others hear in regards to the audio socket, it seems to work perfect for me, im not gonna take it apart to see if theres any shelding on it, so ill just assume they have a work around for it.

one gripe is that the media hotkeys dont work when an application is minimized or out of focus... id like to be able to change songs while not having the itunes window open.

the webcam is great, the webcam manager has some cool effects you can add for a bit of fun, nothing practical really, but fun all the same.

anyway, thats all really, ill get back to enjoying this notebook.

 

Good stuff, so far no complaints of the usual issues.. IT'S A MIRCLE!

 

You use army time? lol
Good review

 

this result seems to be much slower than normal.

 

Likely drivers, or bloat ware.

 

Thanks for putting in the effort to review this.

 

i didnt really know what a good time is... however now ive reformated with vista sp1, i get a time of 22 seconds... a very good increase!!!

 

Thanks for the review. Seems first thing I will be doing on xmas day is a format then lol.

 

wow, I thought you got 1m 22s when calculating for 2M digits... But now, I see you were only calculating 1M digits..! Wow! That's a lot of bloat!!

Could you run SuperPi on 2M digits? It's the standard for benchmark comparison, as far as I know.

Oh, and we appreciate the review [despite the XPS 1530 hogging all the 15"-laptop-buyers' and enthusiasts' attention ]

 

there.

done it guys,

added the 2m benchmark, didnt know that was the standard

an yeah, i use milertery time as standard:O!!!

thanks for reading it people, i hope it helps for people getting this notebook, im happy to answer any questions, either via PM, msn ([email protected]) or on this forum.

 

Very happy after reading your review since I plan on getting exactly the same computer except with a bigger hard drive and im getting the blue one

Thx!

 

Great review! Has me really psyched to get mine on Xmas. (specs in sig, obviously). Though you did mention a pic of desktop and rocketdock... didn't see it in attached. Not really necessary, but I'm just the curious sort

Also. GomPlayer FTW! I use it myself; so incredible, ya? Plays everything I throw at it, except downloaded YouTube vids; for that I recommend FLV Player.

 

Hey, heres the desktop picture, must of left it out

as you can see i have steam, gom player, itunes, msn, firefox and utorrent open, and theres still 1.2gig of ram and the processor isnt even sweating.

yeah, gomplayer is great, perfect for all the videos i throw at it. not too bothered about playing youtube videos, for the quality they are i dont bother downloading them.

have fun with your notebook when you get it yuna

 

that screen shot you just posted,
can i have the name of the gadgets you have on the sidebar,
and the name of the software for the OSX bar at the bottom
Thanks

 

the dock is rocket dock http://rocketdock.com/

and the sidebar gadgets are avalible here http://www.islayer.com/index.php?op=software

 

Very nice review, its a good laptop and gaming peformance has been great also. Glad to hear you enjoying it.

Just a quick question it isn't that big of a thing but with my laptop I got 4.7 on the graphics with nothing changed whereas you started of with 4.6, why do you think that is?

by the way how much total video memory does the 8600M GT have, I know its 256mb dedicated but does your one also say 767mb shared memory in the Nvidia Control panel because thats what its says one mine with total available 1023mb.

 

lol, dont think windows monitoring service is that refined.

i think its a vista thing, called turbo cashe, when vista feels your gfx needs more memory, it lends system memory (ram).