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Inspiron 531 Hot-Rodding project
Just wanted to sign in to thank the members of this site for all the information I was able to gather in my quest to boost the performance (while maintaining a minimal price point) of my old Dell Inspiron 531 desktop.
Bought it for my oldest daughter (I think about 3 years ago) to do homework on it, it was a $349 Dell low-buck special back then.
She has since bought her own laptop and moved out, so the computer wasn't being used. I dragged it out of storage and commenced to modding it.
Originally shipped with a Sempron 3600+ processor, single DVD drive and just 512 Mb of RAM, I set about adding the following to it:
-additional DVD burner drive (cheap on EBAY)
-4 Gb of RAM (also cheap on EBAY)
-ATI Radeon 1800XL video card (totally free from a friend)
-500 watt PSU (EBAY to the rescue again, cheap)
-additional SATA HD for storage that I had sitting around in a drawer, perfectly good
-AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Windsor 3.2GHz Dual-Core Processor , with correct cooler and fan (yep, another EBAY find)
-Windows 7 Professional 32 bit edition
Apologies for the messy cabling, I had just finished the upgrades, and haven't gotten around to neatening up everything just yet:
veefer800canuck
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November 4th, 2010 03:00
Everything went 100% smoothly, all hardware was auto detected by Windows, all drivers were auto-installed or picked up through Windows Update, the entire process was absolutely seamless.
Performance is really snappy now, I have no hangs, no BSOD's, boot time is super fast, the processor and memory are represented properly in "Computer" properties, and device manager shows no goofy hardware or missing drivers.
I re-ran the assesment later and the memory score went up to 7.0
Also have an 8 Gb USB drive in the PC with ReadyBoost enabled.
Next on the agenda is a media card reader, and another friend has a free sound card waiting for me, which may be an improvement over the built-in audio, but I'm not sure until I can see the card and determine it's specs.
jsktx
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November 4th, 2010 09:00
Good job. Beware that if you install a Dell media card reader the boot time will take over 30 seconds. This is a known issue that Dell never addressed. Probably because very few people who ordered an Inspiron 531 included a media reader with their order. I tried one time and sure enough POST time took over 30 seconds, so I decided against installing one.
shesagordie
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November 4th, 2010 11:00
veefer800canuck
Great upgrade. :emotion-21:
One question, did you have any issues with the Win7 32-bit drivers for the Inspiron 531?
Bev.
veefer800canuck
14 Posts
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November 4th, 2010 19:00
Very interesting, thanks for the heads-up.
I had posted another Q on the board regarding the media card reader and later on, I answered it myself. It's P/N W812M
http://www.txcesssurplus.com/servlet/the-6577/Dell-Inspiron-531-537st/Detail
But if it caused slow bootup, I may not get that one. I'll keep looking, thanks.
veefer800canuck
14 Posts
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November 4th, 2010 19:00
Absoloutely none.
Win7 installed perfectly, no hangs. Validation was painless. Any drivers that did not auto-install during initial setup were picked up through Windows Update.
shesagordie
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November 4th, 2010 21:00
veefer800canuck
Thank you, appreciate the heads up.
Bev.