Yay for laptops.

[Armalite]

Check out this fine purchase.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834280004

And of course this little modifications.

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16820231135

And 2 of these.

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822145181

Now what OS should I get? I'll probably dumb ista right away. But I'm not sure what would be the best gaming platform here. XP Pro 64?

[Th0r]

Now what OS should I get? I'll probably dumb ista right away. But I'm not sure what would be the best gaming platform here. XP Pro 64?

XP
Wait until all the software patches come out for Vista
After my numerous bad expieriences with laptops I made the choice never to buy one again!

[Stone]

Don't go for XP64. There's not much driver support. XP Pro is best for gaming at the moment as long as you don't want DX10. If you need to use DX10 then I'm afraid you'll have to go vista. Maybe partition the disc and install XP alongside vista so if you do need to use vista then you can.

[Stone]

And now that I've looked at the specs, which I should have done first... It's not a DX10 gfx card. You can wipe vista 'cos you won't see an increase in quality of gaming. The opposite in fact, you'll have less resources to run the game.

[Armalite]

I also plan to put the hd in RAID0.

I dunno about the XP64 driver thing, is that still that big of an issue? I did a little looking into it and a lot of people out there seem to have found drivers pretty easy. Biggest gripe I heard was actually lack of 64 bit applications.

[Heavy_'TalMeMan]

...Sounds like Armalite has a pocket to burn...:tongue1:

Nice specs right there... Sounds like you're getting a badass laptop.

Dump Vista. Period. That OS ain't worth a shit.

[Armalite]

Combat pay is sweet.

I got like 1300 usd for a 2 week pay period.

[Armalite]

Alright, after quite a bit of fucking around trying to make a bootable usb stick, I finally borrowed a usb fdd and a 1.44 to flash the bios update enabling raid support. weird that it wouldn't be enabled stock, the dual hdd capability is a major selling point for the machine. Enabled striping from bios, and unpacked the mobo drivers on another machine to carve the raid driver out and slapped it on the fdd. A few problems with drive lettering(I forgot the thumbstick was still attached, and had boot priority) and it loaded right up into the Windows XP pro x64 setup. Windows is installing right now. I have the newest drivers from nVidia, and some hacked ones I found on the internets. Will update.

I think the processor may be upgradeable...maybe that will be the next project.

[Th0r]

Combat pay is sweet.

I got like 1300 usd for a 2 week pay period.

My motovation for joining the army...

[Armalite]

The modded gfx drivers act a bit funny and seem to interfere with the sound drivers. But overall acceptable.

Had a goddamn power surge and now my monitor acts strange, on boot I get a screen that looks like the monitor is stuck in a bad refresh cycle. Closing the notebook to put it in standby and then bringing it back up seems to fix it, until I boot again.

[s70n3d]

I just recently bought a dell inspiron 1520 with dual a core 2.2ghz CPU, and 256mb geforce graphics card, and 2gb of memory. Thing is a beast, and the screen is widescreen except it doesnt stretch the graphics... it actually allows the reolution of the widescreen! I'v loved this laptop since I got it, but when i bought it i mistakenly put vista on the operating system.

Well, suposedly there is a problem with XP being able to recognise the hard drive itself unless you set your bios to factory settings (They do something to your bios that doesnt make you able to downgrade to XP, i tried everything in bios that had to do with the sata hard drive and none of them worked...)... so if you have a dell inspiron 1520 with vista, and your sick of your applications crahsing left and right because you like to have 50 million windows open and you use serious programs like vs2005/vs2008... set to factory settings and put your XP cd in and wipe all that garbage they put on your hard drive. Delete every single partition on your hard drive, and make a brand new one that encompases the whole hard drive, install XP and you're set.

It is quite challenging to create intelegent threading solutions (Especially when dealing with math, say a multiplication loop that multiplies byte arrays together... it will only utilize 1 core if you have a sinlge loop... where as if you thread it out un-intelegently it will only utilize 50% of both cores... where as if you thread it out un-intelegently it will utilize both cores and take the amount of time 1 core would take to do the job... where as if you thread it out intelegently it will just bearly ping out both cores to the point it will take half of the time 1 core would take to perform the operation), but it is not impossible. If you get a firm grasp of load balancing you're set!

This laptop is what i concider a beast :) and when quad core comes out for mobile, all i have to do is pop out the chip i got now and pop in the quad and make a few adjustments... and voila! Quad core baby!

[Th0r]

I just recently bought a dell inspiron 1520 with dual a core 2.2ghz CPU, and 256mb geforce graphics card, and 2gb of memory. Thing is a beast, and the screen is widescreen except it doesnt stretch the graphics... it actually allows the reolution of the widescreen! I'v loved this laptop since I got it, but when i bought it i mistakenly put vista on the operating system.


I see they've updated Inspiron a bit.
I had an Inspiron with 512 RAM and a 70GB HDD. I got rid of it though.
Vista is fine for the games, what have you provided you have a decent graphics card [I had to upgrade mine] and it is user friendly but I just dont like it on Laptops.

And by the way, does anyone know where I can get cheap Packard Bell EasyNote batteries?