Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
Sorry, there are quite a few pics available already so I didn't bother to take any. Pics on thie forum are not doing justice to the Midnight Blue top anyway, it's much darker in person (very nice).
First thing first. Boxing. Since it took 4 days (laugh) for Dell to box it, I thought I might comment on the quality of the box it came in. It came in the standard heavy duty corrugated Dell box, but inside that box was a lighter weight white Inspiron box (just like in the pics posted by others) with the manuals, extras, power supply, and software restore CD's on top. Underneath, completely encased in a 2 inch styro shell, was the laptop itself.
Right out of the box, the laptop's batteries were at about 85%, and I was able to play for the first hour with the 6-Cell batteries with no problems at all. Removing the bloat-ware and Norton Antivirus was my first task, which completed in about five minutes or less. Responsiveness was quite good, and I seemed to have very little thrashing on the first boot.
After the bloatware was removed (All Dell support software, Norton Anti-crapware, Google desktop, toolbar, etc) I began to install some games. I had heard that many said the screens were grainy on the Inspiron 1520's but I had seen none yet with my WXGA screen. Games would be a good test, so I got out the World of Warcraft CD's and started installing. An HOUR later... WoW is such a pain in the arse to install, I was ready to patch the game. I quickly shared the WoW folder on my desktop, and went to copy over the patch files to the laptop to save time.
Vista is a pain when you're trying to interface it to XP. Once I turned on the necessary features, turned off the un-necessary features, and joined my workgroup I could then see my desktop PC's. Copying over the files from the desktop (wired to my router) to my laptop (Dell Wireless G card) took about 5-10 minutes (faster than I expected, there was about 500 meg of patch files). My old ACER laptop (with signalboost technology) barely got 802.11b speeds, even with a 54mbit connection. So, for now I give the Dell 54G wireless card a great rating, and it connected on the first try. WoW then began patching. This part absolutely SCREAMED. WoW was done patching in about 5 restarts of the game, which took a total of about 5 minutes. I had recently repeated the reinstallation of my desktop WoW software and I saw virtually no speed decrease performing this on the laptop, other than the slower CDROM drive on the initial installation.
Once I ran WoW, I was able to set the screen up to 1280x800 just fine, and crank up all of the settings for graphics. I then restarted WoW and began to play with an attached mouse. Jittery.. glitchy.. but fast. OK, I had heard of people updating their video drivers.. so I searched the forum and found the correct update method. After the update to 163.14 drivers, I loaded WoW back up and everything was perfect!! This laptop is every bit as fast as my desktop PC which is a AMD Ath. X2 4800 W/2Gig of Dual Channel DDR400 and nVidia G7800. No slow downs at all with WoW. A couple of times the game thashed a bit, but once the initial load was done this subsided and the game played flawless. Still no grain, and a beautifly glossy picture thus far.
Next game up was Overlord. Install went quite fast, and once I picked a close to 1280x800 resolution (it had something like 1280x768 instead) and ran the game, I was shocked at the quaility of the graphics and the screen. Still no grain and a VERY nice pic. The game itself, being a newer one, has some thrash-lag in it, likely because I am running Vista, but that is to be expected. As far as graphics, they look outstanding on this laptop.
Now.. next thing. Extended gaming (30+ minutes) made me realize this laptop was getting hot as hell on the left hand side. I then realized that the laptop intakes air from the bottom vent on the left hand side, and blows it out the left hand side. Well.. put the "laptop" on your lap and you're going to start noticing the heat! Ok, quick trip to the store for a cooling mat, and I'm back in business.
Other than a few known Vista issues, the laptop has performed beautifully. I couldn't be happier with my purchase, and still am astonished I was able to walk away with a laptop like this for $1,170.00 delivered.
Some final notes:
1) Get a cooling mat, or a cooling solution of some sort, at full throttle, this laptop gets frikkin hot! Protect your investiment, get something to cool it off, especially if you're going to sit it on your lap.
2) Get a wireless mouse for the thing if you didn't order one with it..I purchased one separately (logitech) and it's much better for gaming.
3) Don't expect a lot of speed out of the stock 24x CDRW/DVD burner. It's about as slow as they come, but it functioned great.
4) Get new vid drivers on it as soon as possible.
5) The 1280x800 Glossy screens have no grain that I can detect.
6) The 6-Cell battery life seems to be about 2.5 hours or a bit more, and with gaming likely around 1.5 hours (not too shabby!!).
7) The laptop lid is indeed a bit loose, but nothing that noticable.
8) The pics of the color lids on the websites don't do these laptops justice, they are much nicer in person.
9) I can see that Vista would do much better with 4 Gb of RAM. I thought 2 Gb would be enough, but I can see that Vista could soon need more. Games running on Vista (like WoW and Overlord) pretty much eat up what is available, and depending on what is running in the background, may lag you a bit at times while caching. 2 Gb is very useable though, so if you can't afford 4Gb, don't sweat it, but if you can, go for it. I'll be upgrading later.
10) Look into a less power-hungry anti-virus solution, I use AVG Free, it doesn't hog the CPU like Norton or McAfee. Be sure to uninstall all the other bloat-ware.
11) The webcam built into the 1520 is unimpressive. I expected better quality, but I don't really need it so no big deal. It does work though.
12) Because of the angle of the bezel on the CDRW drive, I sometimes accidentally hit the eject button with my leg or pockets when using the laptop on my lap. Not sure that was such a great design idea but it's not that big of deal.
13) Other than Vista's little quirks, there seems to be no slowing down this CPU (2.2 T7500). Can't wait to do some media conversion to compare it with my desktop processor.
14) The 1520 is definately the heaviest laptop I have ever owned, but the power this thing has continues to amaze me. I'll deal with the weight.
15) No phisical imperfections exist at all on my laptop. All ports, jacks, etc. look perfect to me, and seem to work fine. There is no flex in the screen at all, nor is there with the rest of the case. The only two phisical design flaws I see are the position of the eject button on the CDRW drive, and the placement of the air intake on the very bottom of the laptop (that one was stupid!).
I give this laptop a 9 out of 10! And compared to my old laptop(s), it's a 10 out of 10!
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Wow really nice review! I can't wait to get my hands on mine
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Nice review, I know the thread says w/o pics but pics are always welcome
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Spliner summed everything up. Here' my input:
*It's definitely a sturdy, good looking laptop. The red is very attractive. The keyboard is really nice and the touch pad is just right. I like the blue led lights on the side and by the webcam.
*I have absolutely no graininess...the screen is beautiful.
*I'm using the 162.18 drivers for the 8600gt and it's working great. it's a powerful laptop
*there is inteference with my sound card, but it depends on what devices I'm near in the house. rmclock fixed this in a snap.
*vista is a pain in the ass, and so are the drivers. after a few hours I've finally configured everything to perfection, but there were some bumps on the way after my reinstallation of vista.
it's definitely a 9/10. thanks splinter for sparing me the time of writing a full review
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Great review. Can't wait to get my hands on mine!
Yet another 1520 Review (w/o pics)
Discussion in 'Dell' started by Spliner, Aug 20, 2007.
