E6520 Owner's Thread

Sometimes if you put a rubber band over the screw and try to use the screwdriver through that, you can get some extra grip to get it loose.

 

Hammer and small chisel, try and tap it carefully counterclockwise. Drill it out, or try and grip the outside of the screw head with vice grips and loosen. These are all crude ideas unfortunately.

 

The hammer and chisel worked perfectly, thanks for the suggestion. Didn't damage the laptop at all.

 

This has probably been posted, but I can't find it anywhere.

I want to do the 1366x768 - > 1920x1080p upgrade on my E6520 w/ Intel Graphics.

I can't find the proper part numbers, to order the parts I need off eBay. Does anyone have the part numbers?

Thanks!

 

Well, just breathed some new life into my trusty e6520 (main work laptop for the last 5 years).....

I updated the HD to a 1TB Samsung 850 EVO, and in the process also updated from Win7Pro -> Win10Pro.

Boot/login times went from ~5' to ~30 seconds! nice (had a pretty slow 750GB 5400rpm mechanical previously). Windows 10 is what *should* have been the successor of Windows 7, I think based on my short experiences so far...

I currently have 8GB, tempted to go to 16GB, as people have reported that working fine in this laptop (I've got an i5-2520, and it seems a quad core is not needed...).

Was curious about the old discussion in this thread of USB 3.0 in the expresscard slot....has anyone done that successfully? Does it require a separate PS? Is there a card that would work fine without an external power supply for flash drives and such, but can use a PS if needed?

Should be good for another 5 years.......

 

I had to sell my previous E6520 because I needed the money. But luckily I picked up not 1 but 2 more of these from a client. 1 of them went to my wife to replace her machine and 1 went to me.

They both have these specs:

Quad core i7
8GB DDR3 RAM
Nvidia GPU 512MB RAM
1366x768 LCD
Backlit KB
etc.

To mine I added in 16GB of RAM and my Samsung Evo 840 250GB SSD.

I've already fallen "back" in love with the machine, it's like coming home. I am NOT going to sell this one. I've been using an older C2D laptop (Precision M4400 which is rather nice), but having all this power available is nice. The system pretty much responds almost instantly to my input. I am hoping it will serve me well for the next few years.

I am debating on upgrading the LCD but maybe not, this one works fine and everything is nice and easy to read. I've had it for a few weeks now. The only downside is that these are the last 2 of these machines my client had. The rest are E6530's or higher. I may or may not get those once they come off warranty because they tend to e-cycle them once the 3 year ProSupport runs out. However those machines run so great I might just advise they renew the warranty, add SSD's and keep using them. The build quality is very good.The machines are used in construction environments and as their IT consultant, I can tell you they get used hard and put up with it just fine.

With regards to the E6520's if there was ever anything I would change about them if I could go back in time and meet with the engineering time who designed it, I would have had them add in an mSATA slot.

 

Get a 1080P screen for yours. How can you tolerate 1366x768 on a 15" screen?

 

1080P is nice and I've used it on other models such as the E6530 and 6540 when setting them up for clients. I know it's cheap to upgrade also, I have a few followed ebay searches for the LVDS cable and panel. But money is tight. I have to sell off some other gear first. Then I can upgrade. I am also debating on grabbing the bay module to add my other SSD, either for dual boot or for more storage. I haven't decided yet. If I were to dual boot, it would be Windows 10 Enterprise (I get licenses from work) and probably Bunsen Labs Linux. But I really like Windows 10 so I am not too sure about that. Time will tell.

 

I was wondering myself if my 6520 would run Windows 10?

 

See this thread about Win 10 on the E6400 which is 2 generations older. I wouldn't expect you to have problems.

John