Vostro 3350 Owner's Cafe

I think I should add that I often have my office temperature set to 10C. I like it cold in my office, and I'm sure that helps with keeping the CPU and HDD temperatures cooler. You may see higher numbers if you do not have a laptop cooler or some such

 

I am planning to buy a Vostro3350. Can I install a Graphic Card except for this one offered by Dell ?
AMD Radeon™ HD 6490M GDDR5, 512MB

 

Hey,

Been lurking for a while. I just noticed this thread and have been reading through it all. I purchased a Vostro 3350 that I got a deal on through ebay. Great lil system. Problem is, I did a fresh OS install and didnt have the drivers so I've been installing them manually and doing alot of trial and error to get things working. Few questions...

1. Can someone point me to the actual app that controls the fingerprint scanner? I have the Validity driver but no app or instructions on how to get it working.

2. I've been installing alot of drivers being that I didnt really have a good grasp of what was necessary until I found a list of essential vs optional drivers. I now have a ton or processes running at startup. Something like 100 processes. How can I find out what I can get rid of to get my startup times down? I'm at about a 1:35 startup right now with 8gb ram and a 7200 rpm HD.

3. Can someone point me to the webcam driver/ software to get that working?

4. How easy is it to install and setup a 60gb ssd as a boot drive using the optical drive bay and 3rd party caddy to accommodate another drive?

Geekbench (32bit score) of 6058 and Windows Experience score of 5.9 if that helps.

Thanks for the assistance.

 

Also,

I have a Dell brand 8 cell battery at 85% battery health. I'm getting about 6hours on dedicated graphics/ bright screen and longer on intel with powersaving settings even with wifi and other services running.

I'll trade for a 4 cell battery in like new condition if anyone wants to. I don't like the extra bulk of the 8 cell and I always have a plug with me.

 

loud, i do exactly this for clients after cleaning up messy systems.
first, you want to kill the clutter on the system.
download and run ccleaner Download CCleaner 3.15.1643 - FileHippo.com
Good idea to run it about once a week or more. Then open the "Registry" tool, run it, choose "fix", save a backup copy as it suggests, then fix all. when win7 [and its sisters] are first installed and a handful of apps added say during the first month or so, you get a lot of registry junk. first pass at this looks awful. after that the list will be very small. run it once a month or less.

then, this is a good, straightforward no-nonsense guide to dealing with Win7 based processes/services, to cut the background clutter.
Performance Tuning of Windows 7 and Windows Vista - FlashBoot and EBCD Articles

there are other ways of dealing with this stuff but that is a good start.
I use autoruns also. Really, at logon you don't need much running at all - all those updaters can be nipped - you won't succeed at keeping the google updater and the apple [itunes] updater at bay, - they repopulate themselves quite effectively, but don't take much resource.
don't use norton or mcafee suites, and if you uninstall them, find/run their custom "removal tool" or "removal utility" as they leave artifacts behind that cause trouble. [i know some will dispute me on this but I've seen too many botched systems due to these intrusive packages.] small footprint protectors are AVAST free and MSE. I prefer the former [top rated at the current time]. don't duplicate these - you only need one realtime package like that. turn off Windows Defender. unnecessary and doesn't work very well. use chrome or firefox. Leave IE as a paperweight...

 

Thanks Cognus!

52 second boot and now this little machine is speeding along. Nice. This will hold me over until I throw the SSD in.

 

Hi guys,

I need help. I ordered a 3350 with 500GB 7200 RPM HDD. Dell says 7200RPM is not available due to global shortage. Can I take the notebook without a HDD and put one myself? What type of Hard Disk fits in this? I do not want a SSD.

P.S. This is rather urgent as my order is on hold.

 

I just bought a Vostro 3350 with an i5-2430M. I'm running Windows 7 Pro, and everything in it is stock as configured by Dell except I replaced the HDD with a Crucial M4 SSD. My idle temperature is typically in the low 50s (Celsius) and even with the slightest load, like playing a low res youtube video in Firefox, it shoots up to the high 50s and low 60s, and the fan turns on. I don't think this is normal because the fan is on about 75% of the time I'm doing anything at all. Can anyone else share their idle temperatures? What could be wrong with my laptop? I'm using HWMonitor to read them by the way and the ambient temperature is about 22C.

 

I have the i3-2310.

With the Monoprice "cooling bag", I idle at 40-45. Without it, I idle around 50, and with minimal load I expect 50-60.

My fan, on the other hand, doesn't kick in that often.

My ambient temp is 12C (according to the thermostat in my office).

 

Wow, seriously? Does the 3350 really have cooling that ty? I know it's a very compact laptop, but:

1) the Sandy Bridges are supposed to be very power efficient and run pretty cool

2) My old T8100 idled in the low 30s in my older Vostro 1400 (which bit the dust and prompted me to buy the 3350)

Is idling in the 50s really how they're supposed to be?