Dell Inspiron 1525 Reviews
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scottiemedic.... September 28th, 2011
Love it, plain and simple.
I got this laptop off CraigsList some time ago. The owner said it randomly shut down. I blew the CPU radiator out with compressed air and it's but running GREAT ever since.The Inspiron 1525 is one of a handful of laptops that have great tutorials online to make a 'Hackintosh' out of. That is where you have the ability to load Mac OS X on it, even though it's not an Apple computer. The legality of it is somewhat dicey, and I bought the Snow Leopard DVD to be as compliant as I can. Technically, I do think they could give it to you before a judge, so be weary if you do it!! Mine served well for quite some time until I sold it to get an upgrade (funny enough, because I was able to play with OS X on it, I ended up buying a MacBook Pro!!)
This laptop is chock full of upgrade-ability. On the underside, it has one big panel and most components are tucked under the panel, so you don't have to take the whole thing apart like a Sony or HP to upgrade. I was able to get a nice T9300 CPU in there, and it accepts all the Merom line CPUs and some Penryn chips (as long as they are 800MHz FSB). Secondly, 2 screws held in the HDD and it slides out from the left side and in goes a nice 7200rpm drive of your choice.
Back under the hood, a mini PCIe wireless card got a N upgrade over the G adapter in there. Also, it will hold 4GB ram in the two slots. There are also options for WWAN (put an AT&T or verizon smart chip in and voila, you have a FULLY mobile laptop), and a 3rd slot that I put an Intel Turbo Cache card in. It's much the same principle as a mini SSD (2gb in my case), and the non-volatile RAM houses the most frequently accessed info on your laptop, like boot files and files you access everytime you open the laptop. It substantially cuts boot time down and loads whatever it 'learns' quickly from the RAM on-card instead of loading from the HDD.
The DVD is PATA, which was my only disappointment as it was limited to PATA speeds, instead of speedy 3gbps SATA speeds, causing a slow down if you loaded programs from CD/DVD. Since it is such a popular laptop, the have kits to convert the optical bay into a second HDD, so you can add more space or do a SSD/HDD combo.
The graphics are Intel 3100 on a 15.4" LCD, so there won't be any gaming or high def video (it will do 720p), but for productivity or everyday use, this laptop is sorely going to be missed by me.