E6520 Owner's Thread

My brother's E6420 (i7-2720QM, Nvidia) handled the upgrade to Windows 10 just fine. Can't think of any hardware differences with the E6520 which would make a difference.

 

I've bought a few days ago used e6520 with i7-2720QM and succesfully upgraded ram up to 16GB / 1600MHz
right now looking to upgrade keyboard to another, but with backlit (right now I have one without backlit) and looking for wwan module to be able to use 3g. Can anyone tell me can I buy any mini pci-e 3g module or in our laptop only a few compatible boards can work properly

 

Dell laptops do not have whitelists. The Sierra Wireless MC7700/MC7710 / MC7355 / MC7455 work just fine in that laptop for 4G LTE. Which one you want depends upon where you want to use it and how much $$$ you have to spend.

 

i'm going to use it in Ukraine, only 2g/3g networks available right now (but who knows, maybe one day 4g became available)

MC7700 looks good for it's price, but did not support 2g/3g as I can see

 

Take a closer look at the spec sheets. Those boards have excellent backwards compatibility.

 

my fault, I just found spec "LTE Region North America" and did not look forward about umts bands.. thanks...
I can see that u use the same modem, can u tell how is GPS working with it, or it's just useless feature in this device

 

The Win7 -> Win10 upgrade went very smoothly. The only things to note:
1) Initially, Intel wasn't going to support 2nd gen processor graphics (HD 3000) under Win10 - but it seems they have relented as I have appropriate Intel drivers installed and no problems. For those with Optimus (NV4200m) also no problems
2) the SD card slot is not supported under Windows 10, so you will lose that functionality. This is specific for the 6 series/C200 Chipset family (with the i5's). The i7's have an upgraded chipset that appears to work with manual driver installs (search web).

All else works smoothly - and I am actually pleased with Windows 10 (after the Win8 travesty which I skipped).

 

Can't get the Intel HD Graphics driver to install?

 

I have found this to be an excellent and totally reliable laptop, but mine is getting on for five years old so I wondering if upgrading to a more recent laptop would be any benefit?

I have upgraded the E6520 with a Samsung SSD, have 8GB of RAM (enough for my needs) and was even able to upgrade the CPU with a cheap i7-2820QM. It runs Windows 10 and everything works fine. Very quick.

I don't do any gaming or video encoding. Mostly just web, Office and Visual Studio and 99% of the time I use the E6520 with an external monitor so screen quality isn't an issue.

Is it worth upgrading? I don't feel that anything is wrong with the E6520, though I know the HD3000 graphics is badly out of date.

 

The performance of the Intel GPU will not be an issue for your usage pattern. Newer hardware is more power efficient which would be a consideration if you use the notebook away from a power outlet but, based on what you have said, there is no real benefit to upgrading. You would struggle to notice the performance difference without running benchmarks.

John