Comments from someone with a ~5 year old Dell Inspiron

Hey all,

One of the truths on the internet is that people complain more than they praise a product, generally speaking. I wanted to take a moment to praise a laptop I bought for my (then fiance) wife 4.5 years ago. A dell inspiron ~8600 (like this one http://www.trustedreviews.com/notebooks/review/2003/12/27/Dell-Inspiron-8600/p1)

IIRC, since I'm away from it right now, it has a 1.5 ghz celeron processor, 512mb of ram, integrated video card, 60 gig HDD...

For the entire time we have had it, not one hardware failure. The only "problem" we have had is that occasionally I need to insert a CD/DVD twice before it's recognized....not sure if that's user error, scratched discs, of the drive itself.

This thing regularly sees hours of operation on our down comforter running DVDs with no cooling pad. The underside gets hot to the point you can't leave your hand on it for more than 2-3 seconds. The hard drive has been infected with one virus ("Windows antivirus 2008"), receives highly irregular scans and defrag).

I have never cleaned the vents or taken off an underside panel. It has been lugged around, dropped from 1-foot-18" heights onto hard and carpeted surfaces multiple times. It has no dead pixels, the screen still looks fine (albeit it doesn't perform to today's expectations).

We routinely leave it plugged into A/C power non-stop and drain it till it auto-shuts down. After ~4.5 years, it will perform 2.5-4 hours of web surfing, e-mailing, word/powerpoint, and video activities before being drained.

I was reading some FAQs about proper notebook care and came across how many different rules I was "breaking"....and wanted to point out that this Dell, at least, has taken it all in stride.

I'm considering buying a XPS Studio 16 as a replacement, and have looked at some of the Sager models. My solid experience with Dell makes me want to stay with them, even though it appears the Sager models might have a few upsides in what I'm looking for.....

Hope someone out there enjoys this

Joe

 

Wow. That battery life especially is impressive. Maybe I won't ever have to replace my battery after all - I'd noticed it still did pretty good, but figured maybe it'd likely plummet some month for no apparent reason. Perhaps not!

The too-hot-to-touch is the only somewhat alarming part, but considering I can get mine up to 90C sometimes without excessive effort, and that would probably be too hot to touch, I suppose that might not be too bad. Does it have a metal frame that conducts heat well? Even at 90C (processor) there's no area that's too hot to touch on the outside of my laptop, but I imagine there probably would be inside or if it conducted heat to the outside better.

I've actually been quite satisfied with my Inspiron's durability thus far as well, though it's only 1.5 years old. If it's still going strong in 3 years, I might have to dig up this thread then.

 

You still have some fantastic batt' live..very nice!

I enjoyed reading your comments about your Inspirion.
If you are pondering the XPS 16..you should check the thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=345445
It's fairly large, but very informative nonetheless..and you will find lots of SXPS 16 owners...and potential owners that post there

Cin

 

Thanks for both your comments. I've really been impressed. I consider a 3-year lifespan to be a good stretch for a laptop, and I've gone about 50% over that with poor practices. The battery life was VERY impressive for about 3 straight years. I leave wireless on all the time as well, by the way. We don't fiddle with power settings. I've noticed it dip a bit, but it's still staggering considering what we've done with it.

I've checked out that thread Cin, but I'll look it over again. I'm a little concerned about the XPS' heat issues, weight, 16x9 format, and expensive 9-cell battery. If I can get a similarly equipped 15.4" with no heat issues, ~6 pounds with a 9-cell, I'll be quite happy (although I don't know if that's realistic within the same price range of about $1200).

We'll see

 

P.s. My Dell Latitude D620 (work provided computer) is a 14" workstation and provides almost identical battery life. It stays docked all day too, so I imagine the docking station somehow prevents overcharging the battery.

 

haha, the dell ur praising is not the same dell 5y ago:
5 years ago, it was kevin rollins as ceo, not michael dell
5 years ago, dell stock is $30+, now at $8;
5 years ago, dell only had inspiron & latitude,
now dell has xps/xps studio/studio/inspiron/mini netbooks,
vostro & latidue at businees side
5 years ago, dell was making billions of money every year, now dell havent had a profitable quarter since the end of 2006.
5 years ago, dell had 30% of us all pc sale, now still 30%+.
5 years ago, dell users was laughing at apple buyers for being computer illeterates, now dell is copying apple designs.
5 years ago, no dell laptops had overheat problem. now most of them.
5 years ago, dell laptops are dull, ugly boxes,
now dell is chic and attrative and broke.

 

If you're looking for 15.4", you might want to check out the Studio 15. I've had one for a few months now, and I'm quite happy with it, and it weighs around 6 pounds. And mine didn't cost nearly $1,200.

Another good Dell 15.4" is the XPS 1530. I don't know about the weight; I don't own one, but it's a bit more powerful than the Studio 15 and a bit more expensive.

 

Very well done on your battery life.

There are people on this forum with I8000s which must be 8 or 9 years old now, so I hope your 8600 has got many more years left in it.

 

In my book, the Inspiron 8500 and 8600 are the best Dell laptops ever made. Every single part of them was completely upgradeable. The 8500 is the system I choose as my first laptop. For $2800 it was a beast of a machine. I upgraded the processor, memory, harddrive, graphics and screen on their. Best system Dell ever made. Fan control, never got hot, innovative. First system to ever sport a 1920x1200 15.4" screen, and a smart bay system
I still use my 8500 to this day, the first harddrive had nearly 5000hrs of use before it was replaced with my new Samsung harddrive.

If you are worried about heat, download I8KFANGUI.
It is very easy to setup and you can control your fans from their.
I respect these old dells because you get better battery life on them than the new ones. I had the smart bay 48whr battery and the internal 72whr battery and with the pentium 4m I got just shy of 7hours of battery life for years. The original main battery is still going, I only had to reflash my smart bay battery because they are coded to die quick.

Great system, make it better, clean those fan vents. It is only two screws. It takes less than 5 minutes to do. Just blow the dust out

K-TRON

 

Meh, actually, my Studio 15, XPS m1530, and Inspiron 15 (new black one) don't get hot. Nothing like my old Hp dv2700t.

 

1. Kevin is who got Dell in some of its trouble. Thank goodness Michael is back.
2. Show me a stock that hasn't been killed this year.
3. More products for more markets, another good thing.
4. What? The last I checked Dell made over $2 billion in profits in 2008, even after a $350 million right off in the fourth quarter.
5. Dell is holding its margin share even with the onslaught of competition like Acer and Asus.
6. The 8500 and 8600 were good systems but in my experience they continued to improve each year until the Studio line came about. The 9200/9300, 6000/6400 were all better systems than the previous generation machines. I would say the majority of heat related flaws with recent Dell systems was NVIDIA related.
7. My current Dell systems are all running solid, cool and they look good to boot, all for alot less cash than a comparable Apple.

 

the i8600 series were really nice machines. mine lasted 4 years, was dying by the end of the 4th year though, and the final straw came when i spilt a pint of beer on mine

i'd still be using mine today if that hadnt happened. replaced it with a precision m4400.

 

I concur! I'm still on my Inspiron 600m from the Fall of 2003. Six years! The 600m, which I paid $1700 for, was basically the thin and light version of the 8600. The fact that I'm not a gamer, and that I configured it to fairly high end specs for the time probably played a major role in the life of the system. I intend to do the same with my next purchase and will stick with Dell; mostly because of this great experience. I think my next one will be either the Studio XPS 16 or the new Studio 1555 (coming soon to the US...hopefully).

 

You asked for comments from someone with a ~5 year old Inspiron. My Dell is just (or already) 3.5 years old but I think you might find my observations useful.


Model: Dell Inspiron 9400/E1705

+ powerful machine. Although it's not new it still is quite fast. Of course this is related to the original configuration.

+ great quality LCD (17", 1920x1200; big viewing angles!)

+ computer does not get hot. CPU temperature is around 30oC (60oC when playing games). GPU does not exceed 85oC (60oC when not in 3D mode).

+ great speakers

+ fairly easy to disassemble and upgrade parts



- battery died after one year

- low built quality. It looks though but it's prone to scratches. The "INSPIRON" logo on top of the LCD came off after a couple of months

- screen hinges are loose and cannot be tightened

- recently the backlight/inverter is causing problems. The screen tends to suddenly go dark

- optical drive is noisy and has problems with reading many discs

Simon

 

I've got a Dell Inspiron 5150 that's about 5 years old now, if not 6 years old. I guess it's a hit and miss cause the 5150 was a piece of crap to say the least. Dell really screwed up when they released the 5150. It's been known to have overheating issues as well as motherboard problems. To top it off, my unit's hard drive has failed twice.

I am hesitant to purchase another Dell laptop but we'll see what the reviews say about the soon to be released in the U.S. Studio 1555. If they aren't good, I can't go wrong with a Lenovo Thinkpad T500.