Digital Archaeology: Dell Inspiron 1720

I've always thought Dell has maintained better consistency in the quality of their laptops than most. There are, of course, exceptions. These days there aren't even that many brands to choose from.

The Inspiron 1720 is a 17-inch laptop featuring the Core 2 Duo line of processors. The hardware if this particular laptop includes:

• CPU: Core 2 Duo T7250 @ 2 GHz
• RAM: 3 GB DDR2
• Video: Mobile Intel GMA X3100
• Screen: 17-inch @ 1440x900

See the output of HardInfo for more detailed specs.

There are a couple of disappointing things about this laptop. The first is the screen resolution. In my opinion, a screen this big should have at least a 1080p resolution. There was in fact an available 1920x1200 display for this model but sadly not on the one that I have. The next disappointing item is the lack of a discrete GPU.

Having said that, the big screen is still nice. And for purposes other than gaming, the lack of a discrete GPU doesn't really matter. I still would have liked the higher resolution screen though.

The Core 2 Duo was plenty fast enough for the time this laptop was released and among the fastest CPUs available. The 3GB of RAM was a common amount for 32-bit operating systems since they typically couldn't see a full 4GB. T

For whatever reason, it seems that laptops based on the Core 2 Duo, except for the latest generation, were limited to 4 GB of RAM, this one included. This was an unfortunate limitation given that 64-bit CPUs had been around a while by this point and 64-bit operating systems had also been available for a while (Linux, XP-64, Vista). This limitation really made such laptops prematurely obsolete.

The all silver keyboard/bezel/palmrest area looks nice though past experience suggests that it can be easily scratched and worn. However, this one appears to be in close to mint condition. The outside is black which while perhaps the most common, also looks the best. The lighting is blue which seems to be common for the time.

This laptop is currently running the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. The 3GB seems sufficient for the OS and light browsing, however, performance suffers if you try to use more than a couple of tabs. In theory, it should run XP and Windows 7 well, it is probably capable of running Windows 8 and at least earlier builds of Windows 10 as well.

Speaking of upgrades, the CPU is upgradeable to at least the Core 2 Duo T9500 which is 2.6 GHz which would be a reasonable bump in speed. As mentioned above, the official maximum amount of RAM is 4 GB but 6 GB seems to work at least in some cases. However, the biggest performance increase you can get from any older laptop is by replacing the hard drive with an SSD. I probably won't be upgrading this one though if it had the higher resolution screen I might.

Like all the machines I have, I installed BOINC and attached to my usual projects. I think memory limitations may prevent it from getting any work for Rosetta@home but it has gotten (or should get) work for Einstein@home, Asteroids@home, MilkyWay@home, Universe@home and World Community Grid. You can also check out how it is doing overall at FreeDC.

Photo at the top and screen shot are mine, all other images are from the manual.

Read more: https://www.megalextoria.com/wordpress/index.php/2024/02/20/digital-archaeology-dell-inspiron-1720/