Digital Archaeology: Dell Inspiron E1705

about 2 months ago (Edited)

The Inspiron line has long been Dell's main consumer laptop models (well, until very recently when they for some reason started naming all their machines very generically). The Inspiron E1705 was released in the 2005 timeframe.

The Inspiron E1705 supported a very large range of hardware options. There were two different motherboards used. One supported add-in video cards such as the FX2500M, GeForce Go 7800 and 7900GTX among others while the second motherboard option only supported Intel's integrated graphics. Display options included a 17" Wide Screen WXGA+ (1440x900) panel or a 17" Ultrasharp Wide Screen WUXGA (1920x1200) panel. The processor could be anything from a single core 32-bit Core Solo T1300 running at 1.66 GHz all the way up to 64-bit Core 2 Duo T7600 running at 2.33 GHz.

My particular E1705 is definitely one of the lower end models. Specs include:

CPU: Core Solo T1350 @ 1.86 GHz
Graphics/Chipset: Intel 945GM
Memory: 1GB DDR2-533 (2x512MB)
Display: 17" WXGA+ (1440x900)
Hard Drive: 80GB 5400RPM

Plus tons of expansion slots and ports including 4 USB 2.0 ports, an ExpressCard 54mm slot, FireWire, 5-in-1 Flash Reader, headphone and microphone connections, 1 DVI-D, 1 VGA, and 1 S-Video Out. I miss all the built-in I/O options laptops used to have. These days you generally have to find a USB-C dongle with whatever you need.

As far as upgrade possibilities, a Core 2 Duo T7600 could be added and up to 4GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM is supported. Unfortunately, there are no graphics update options as this motherboard in the one with the built-in Intel chipset/graphics.

This laptop was made with Windows XP and Vista in mind. It is also capable of running Windows 7 and even Windows 10. However, modern operating systems supporting 32-bit CPUs are getting pretty hard to find these days. I'm currently running a 32-bit version of Debian which is the only mainstream Linux distribution I am aware of that still does new 32-bit releases.

Like pretty much any computer I ever own, this one is running BOINC whenever it is turned on. It still gets work for at least Einstein@home and maybe a couple of others.

Overall, this seems to be a pretty solid laptop with a great deal of expansion possibility for its time. The build quality is decent and the keyboard feels pretty good. However, it isn't as nice in that regard as later Latitudes and Precisions. Despite pushing the CPU at 100% all the time with BOINC, it runs cool and quiet. The large size no doubt helps some with that, plus it has a pretty anemic single core CPU at the moment.

Despite having some fairly significant upgrade potential, I doubt I will be upgrading this one. I would rather start with the model with the higher resolution screen and perhaps the ATI graphics option if I were going to bother.