Dell Inspiron 1501
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Horrible quality, built so cheap...
by Ryo on Dec 31st, 2007 at 11:35 AM:
AMD Turion X2 1.9 GHz
2048 MB DDR RAM
160 GB hard drive
256 MB Integrated Dedicated video memory.
Okay, here's what it actually has.
Processor 1.8 GHz
RAM 1024 MB
149 GB (I expected this)
A really horrible ATI Xpress 128 MB dedicated.
When I opened the box I wasn't really impressed by anything this laptop had to offer, especially when it booted into vista and I checked on its specs first thing. I was not disappointed because I expected Dell to pull this crap. I thought it was no big deal on the vid ram, 128 was still a far cry from my ThinkPad t23's 16 MB. Here's the thing...
That 128 MB of video ram couldn't even play games that required 32 MB of ram. Ideally Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic and Max Payne 2. KOTOR runs like a lumberjack pinned by a tree, and max Payne causes the piddly little horrible quality ATI card to melt down and memory dump. Afterward, simply using the machine caused video card melt down and memory dumps. Going into then out of sleep mode scrambled my screen every time. Just disabling all sleep options and closing the screen so it's off caused this!
So, being a computer network administrator (studied to associate's at ITT Tech) I decided to take an old copy of XP Professional since Dell's site had driver support for that OS. This cleared up so many problems; I never wanted to go back to Vista. None of it worked however until I downloaded their entire stupid BS that just bogged the system down. It went from booting in 10 seconds to booting in nearly a minute...why?!
The only thing that didn't clear up at all was the video crashing...I already had a vendetta with ATI who I once swore by for the issues their cards have in running games with high texture, and their constantly crashing garbage drivers. This is the worse I ever saw it.
Using this machine has been nothing short of frustrating beyond any tales my computer experiences could tell. It ranks up there with trying to find and delete viruses manually in a bunk install of Windows 98 back in the day. XP Pro works beautifully on my T23 and it seems it's going to be taken off the 'for sale' rack for a while since I have lost every shred of faith I slowly built in Dell. Now the last hope for modern laptops to me is Toshiba. Whatever, I got better things to do with the 800 dollars I paid for this door stop. I am taking it back for a full refund. Shame on you Dell for going cheap and falsely advertising what could have been a wonderful machine.