Repair and Upgrade old Laptop

Calibos

Have a 17 Inch Dell Vostro 1700 that experienced the dreaded motherboard failure about 3 years ago out of Warranty. It was mothballed in the bottom of a wardrobe ever since when research showed me that a new motherboard (HX766) would cost about €250.

Came across it again today and decided to research again. Turns out that not only can the motherboard be had on ebay for about €85 including postage

I also discovered I could upgrade CPU as far as a Core 2 Duo T9300 (2.5ghz 45nm chip) from the installed T5870 (2ghz 65nm) ie the Penryn 800FSB chips work in Merom boards.

CPU Passmark 1123 vs 1713

Would be about €60 including shipping.

Maxing Memory to 4gb DDR2 would cost about €60 including shipping

I can donate a 60gig SSD and 250gig 5200RPM 2.5" drives to the cause.

Literally all it will be used for is Web browsing and watching upto 1080P quality Video.

Is it worth resurrecting this PC and maxing out its spec for €200

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or

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Resurrecting it with the new mobo but leaving the spec alone for €85

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or

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Returning it from whence it came at the bottom of the wardrobe?

Torqay

Got one of these sitting here, the 8600M GT is fried (works grand in safe mode standard VGA, the moment the Nvidia GPU driver loads it's over).

Calibos wrote: »

Literally all it will be used for is Web browsing and watching upto 1080P quality Video.

Does yours have the WUXGA display (1920x1200)?

I wouldn't spend more than the €85 for the new mobo on it. The CPU is good enough for full HD, even w/o hardware acceleration.

Calibos

IIRC it was the 1920x1200 version alright. Pretty sure it had the 8400gs though. We're they mutually exclusive though?

Did your 8400gt have visible scorch marks or anything? My gs looked perfect. I don't remember if I ever tried to boot up without the gpu installed. I get the green light on the 90w adapter going out when its plugged into the laptop which I heard is a sign that the mobo is fried. Is it worth removing the gpu and trying again. A replacement gpu from eBay is a lot cheaper than a mobo.

Torqay

Didn't even bother checking. But it's easy to replace and those mobile Nvidia 8xxxM have quite a reputation.

Calibos

Put my service tag into the dell support site and although the component list is a mess of truncated info I googled the Part numbers.

8400m gs with the 1600x900 WXGA+ screen.

Thats not the only new information I have to share though....

I pressed the power button for a laugh and........................the fcuking thing turned on for the first time in 3 years !!!!!

Now keep in mind over the last 3 years I've striped it down into pieces about 3 times. I've reseated everything several times, I've examined pins and solder points for battery and DC jack numerous times, I've done all the "Press this button and that button with the powerbutton....put pressure on the keyboard or casing here or there while holding the powerbutton" etc etc I even did this only last night while composing this thread FFS.

I simply pressed the powerbutton tonight and if fecking turns on like nothing was ever wrong!!!

Now, of course the battery only had about 3 minutes charge left after 3 years lying idle and there is no HDD in the laptop because I robbed that for use elsewhere years ago. So all I got was the dell bootup screen and 'could not find boot drive' dos screen. F2 opened the Bios menu and then the battery gave up.

However, that means there is nothing wrong with the motherboard after all.

So I need to find the 4.62A adapter or buy a new one (€12), buy a 9 cell replacement battery (€20), possibly buy a new DC jack and solder it to mobo (€15) and then decide whether to upgrade the ram to 4 gigs (€55), upgrade the processor to a T9300 (€50), second SSD caddy (€5) and 8600M GT 256mb (€20)

I can't believe it!!!

Torqay

Why bother with a battery? Battery life was never great to begin with, an hour and a half tops with WLAN.

If the GPU is still working, upgrading to a 8600M isn't worth it either. Wouldn't make any difference for "web browsing and watching 1080P quality Video" (the display isn't full HD anyway).

See if you find a cheap PSU on adverts, install some Linux distro on your SSD and enoy it while it lasts.

Calibos

I swear this thing is self healing Using a 65w adapter from in inspiron in the house who's green led would go out when plugged in now worked with the Vostro and actually charged the battery. The battery button and battery health and charge readouts in the bios now indicate a fully charged and healthy battery.

However after a full charge I found it was still cutting out after a minute or two. Noticed the fan wasn't spinning and wondered whether I had remembered to reconnect the fan the last time I had it apart 18 months ago. Sure enough fan cable was disconnected.

.......However it was still shutting down after a minute or two. Then I realised that the last time I took the whole thing apart to diagnose 18 months ago, I probably decided not to waste Thermal paste on what I thought was a dead motherboard, so didn't re-TIM when I put it back together.

Sure enough, there was no Thermal paste left on the CPU or GPU dies. Cleaned the dried old paste from around the dies and used my Arctic Cleaning solutions to clean up to a mirror shine. The applied my Icy Diamond TIM and put the laptop back together.

Result!! Now while I have no drives to put in it yet and thus only have the bios to play with, I did run the bios diagnostic tests which put some load on the cpu. Fan came on and hot air started coming out the side vent heatsinks. Machine passed the bios CPU memory, GPU tests and stayed turned on till I turned the machine off myself 40 minutes later.



I mainly post this picture to show that I am not some gobshee who would be helped immeasurably by someone in tech support saying, "Did you try turning it off and on again". I've diagnosed and fixed plenty of my PC's over the years and am the families goto IT guy.

The irony is not lost on me however, that after all the attempts at diagnosis in 2010 and 2011, it was effectively "Turning it on again" that seemed to fix the bloody thing!!

While I was at it, I removed the Wireless G mini-pcie card and installed a wireless N card from my recent mini-ITX build (MSI H87i mobo). The antenna cables wouldn't reach the shorted Wireless N card. So I stripped down the LCD panel to get at the antenna cables behind it and rerouted them a more direct route. This gave me the extra inch of cable length I needed to reach the N mini PCIE card.

It got me thinking though. Would it be worth upgrading the LCD panel to the 1920x1200 one. They can be had for 70 dollars on ebay too. In a way, it almost would make the other upgrades worthwhile, as 1920x1200 17.5" Laptops are few and far between these days and cost a fortune

Torqay

I just had a look at my old Vostro, it's actually a 1510. Not so lucky with a removable GPU, the 8600M is soldered. I have tried Windows XP and 7, both fine with the Standard VGA driver but when I load any Nvidia or Omega driver I'm getting loads of artefacts on the screen.

Now I have installed VectorLinux (Slackware, Xfce) and all is well. I guess it just earned itself another lease of life.

danger_mouse_tm

I've had a couple of "self healers" over the years. I'm actually using a customer's Acer asprie 4810tz here that sorted itself out a year later after I took it for parts as a trade in. opps!
One thing I will say about the depleted battery and the Dells; I have had numerous 1545 and 1525 laptops in here and many have suffered power board failure AFTER the battery no longer holds a charge. I honestly don't know if the two are related. I would recommend that you carry out your upgrades in stages as you don't know if this machine is going to stay up. It would do no good to upgrade the screen and have the laptop fall over again a week later!

ED E

I'm still running a Vostro 1000 to this day. Its about to give up the ghost but considering I paid like €340 god knows how many years ago for it and its been abused to hell I have to say Im very impressed. Upgraded it from a 2Ghz Sempron to a 2Ghz Athlon X2 myself for 20 quid. 160GB drive to a 500. 2GB as stock, 1280x800 panel and heavy as f'ck, thus the need for it to go.

Only took her down earlier tonight to get some dust out and reduce the temps, but the fan is failing I think. In any case, every dell business machine Ive ever had my hands on has been a tanky mofo. Cant kill em.

Calibos

Just thought I'd update this.

Didn't bother with the CPU,GPU or screen upgrades.

Just upgraded the ram to 4gb, Put in 60gb SSD and put the 250gb HDD back in. Installed Win 7 64bit.

The SSD only runs at Sata 1 speeds despite the board supporting Sata 2 (Sata Daughter board causes this apparently) However, still twice as fast as a HDD. Boots in about 11 seconds and shuts down quickly and Win 7 feels very responsive. Plays 1080p youtube smoothly once its finished buffering. XBMC is smooth.

Perfect for the uses it'll be tasked with.

Very pleased that the unused Wireless N card from my new H87i mobo in another PC replaced the old Wireless G card in the laptop and worked perfectly. Connecting at 300mbps.