Dell 1520 Aftermarket Upgrades

Hey, I bought a dell 1520 off a friend of mine for a pretty good deal, however he chose to go with a T5450 cpu and a 8400 gs video card. I was wondering what would be involved in doing an aftermarket upgrade to something like a t7300 and a 8600 gt.

Also this laptop make a squeal sound when its running, it is not loud, however when I am using it in a silent room it is kind of annoying. Also the headphone jacks on this thing suck as when there is no sound being output they also squeal. Is there anyway to fix these problems or do I just live with it.

Thanks

 

I believe you would need to buy an entirely new laptop. I suggest telling him to return if he can or cancel his order and put the 8600 GT on it now.

 

For most laptops, the graphics card is not upgradeable, though I don't know if it's really possible or not. The processor should be fast enough for most needs, and I doubt you'd really need to upgrade.

The sounds you hear are common among many laptops, most notably those with a Core2Duo processor. The whining noise without earphones can be removed using the RMclock tweaks you can find on this forum; the headphone noise requires either a usb soundcard, or the creative x-fi expresscard soundcard if you want truly hiss-free ouput; for most music, however, it's unnoticeable when the music is playing.

 

well thanks for the info on the squealing, it too bad that I cant get a 8600 gt in my laptop though

 

You can certainly upgrade those components, but they require a bit more work than the average desktop upgrade.

The CPU is upgradeable to the last 2.6ghz Merom that will be arriving in Q4 this year. It will take a lot of taking apart of your laptop, but is an easy drop in upgrade.

The GPU (8600m GT) is also upgradeable via a drop in upgrade, but again requires extensive disassembly. Order one from Dell Spare Parts, but it might end up costing you more than if you just bought it now instead of the 8400. If you had gotten integrated graphics though (X3100), I'm not sure if it would be possible to upgrade to discrete.

Your squeal is the CPU whine, you can try to curb it by using RMclock. Many people seem to be having this problem lately.