Rum & Dal

I’ve had my Dell Inspiron 1520 for about 2.5 years now and I thought it was time for a little “pimping” As you know its pretty difficult to upgrade a laptop due to many integrated parts, so what can you do to make a differance? Upgrade the RAM, hard drive and OS?  Originally my Dell spec was Windows Vista 32bit (Home Premium) 3GB RAM and 250GB Hard drive (5400rpm)

I ended up replacing the conventional spinning hard drive with a 30Gb solid state drive with windows 7 home premium 64bit

RESULTS

Original Specification
Base score 4.6 (see fig 1)
Boot time to ‘user’ screen 50.8 seconds
Shutdown from ‘user’ screen 26.4 seconds

Original Spec.

Fig 1

Upgraded Specification
Base score 4.6 (see fig 2)
Boot time to ‘user’ screen 22.3 seconds
Shutdown from ‘user’ screen 7.3 seconds

Upgraded Spec.

Fig 2

Hard disc Capacity (actual space is 27.8GB)
Due to all my files being housed on my NAS drive I didn’t think I required a large SSD drive and I could only afford the 30GB SSD drive.  Minimum software was installed as I was tight on space but this is pretty much all I use on my Laptop

The follow software was installed:-

Windows 7 Home Premium
Office 2007 (word, excel, outlook)
Live MSN
Security Essentials
Skype
Acrobat Reader
WinRAR
Flickr Uploader
Google Chrome
FFDshow

Windows 7 used about 12Gb after updates.  I now have 5.8GB Free

Costing
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit OEM $129.95 AUD
30GB Kingston SSD Drive – V series $129.95 AUD
Delivery $14.99 AUD

Purchased from Shopping Square (very slow at responding to emailing and delivery was over 16 working days.  I would not recommend this store)

CONCLUSION

The performance of my Dell has improved and is now incredibly quite.  Yes the base score has remained 4.6 but this was due to the graphics card.  Look closer at the score table and you will notice all other sub scores have improved due to the OS optimizing the hardware.

The main improvement is the boot speed which I am very happy with and I have noticed that it is a little cooler on my lap.

Tip
Windows 7 did not install the driver for my graphics card.  I had to download and install from Nvidia