Todays feature will concern proper laptop care, and 4 rules to help keep it maintained and as pristine as the day it arrived. Recently (within the last 6 months) I purchased a new Dell Inspiron 1520 notebook to replace my 8 year old deprecated Gateway notebook. My Gateway was so old that it only had 128 MB's of RAM and a 1.2 ghz Pentium 3 processor. It only had on-board video (You can start giggling now). Compare that with my recent order and it's like day and night. Now we live in a world where everyone effectively has at leat 2 ghz's of processor power (either through OCing or as a default setting) and RAM is measured in GB's. Needless to say I wish to take good care of my investment. The first thing I noticed is that the new HD glossy widescreens attract dust much more quickly than my old notebook did. The way in which I used to clean my screen was with windex and a paper towel. I was heartbroken when I discovered that on my new screen, this left streaks. Unacceptable! The quest for a new methodology had begun; I immediately went to my nearest Wally world (Wal-mart), if anyone in my area had the supplies I would need at the lowest possible prices it would be them. After hours of what seemed like endless searching, I believed I had found my Holy Grail, lens cleaner. Yes, Wal-mart's optical "department" (it's really more of a hole carved in the wall, a hovel if you will) had a special on combo packs of lens cleaner. It came with several pre-moistened towlettes, a bottle of lens cleaner (with free refills for life) and a lint-free dry cloth. It was perfect. Naturally, my screen has never looked sexier. That brings us to rule #1: Lens cleaner is great for cleaning your notebook's screen.
My Inspiron also came with a massive 9-cell lithium-ion battery. I can get upto 6 hours of steady power (enough to play Gears of War without hiccups) from this baby with my WiFi turned off. Back when I bought my Gateway, lithium-ion technology was still in it's infancy. It didn't really shine until it was used in iPods. Naturally, I didn't get as much out of my old battery because I didn't know that lithium-ion batteries retain a longer overall life if they are used frequently, and only charged when they need to be. I would not be making the same mistake here. This leads us to rule #2: Use it or lose it. Only plug your AC power source in when needed, or when doing tasks that consume lots of power (gaming, movie watching, etc).
As with all PC's, keeping your drivers/bios up-to date is important. With my Inspiron, I initially had difficulty updating my display drivers. I have an nVidia GeForce Go 8600M GT, and so naturally began my search at nVidia's website. I would later learn that their do-it-yourself search system was flawed for notebooks. It is relatively easy to get necessary desktop drivers, but the only model they had a search mechanism for as far as notebooks went was the 8700M GTX. I then installed their ActiveX application so that nVidia could automatically detect my hardware configuration and send me to where my driver update was located. It was then that I was informed that Dell had given nVidia specific instructions not to distibute drivers to those with my model notebook and GPU. Dell is one of those vendors that likes to add customizations to driver updates, and therefore I would need to update my drivers directly from them. This leads us to rule #3: Get your driver updates from your notebook vendor whenever possible.
While I was waiting on my drivers to finish downloading, I surfed around Dell's online support center. "As long as I'm here, I may as well find everything else that I need", I said to myself. I looked up the latest BIOS version, and sure enough, there was an update. I downloaded it, and after installing my video drivers, I sat down to update my BIOS. I hadn't updated a notebook BIOS in a long time (I'm used to desktops, which are always plugged in to a power source), but luckily when I tried to flash my BIOS with the AC cord unplugged, Dell's software warned me of the dangers. Some vendors may not have such foresight, so that brings us to rule #4: Always plug yourself in before flashing your BIOS.
3 comments:
Thanks for becoming a Dell customer and I bet there is a difference in performance between your old system and the new Inspiron. For future reference don't hesitate to check out the tools in the Dell Support Center or at Dell.com when it comes to maintenance. For example this is the link for caring for screens on laptops:
http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?c=us&dl=false&l=en&s=gen&docid=DFCC6A44B2374EF6B398593361662C3B&doclang=en&cs=
Not a bad list. Rofl is that a dell rep posting a comment? They may have aggregated your post or something, that's just funny.
BTW, in many cases, the desktop drivers fully support laptops. The issue is, NVIDIA does not want to directly support laptops because OEMs have a long history of breaking hardware specs and doing other nasty, incompatible hardware changes. If you're content with you Dell drivers, then continue to use only Dell. Dell, like most OEMs, tend to fall far behind on current video drivers, so the desire to run something current will almost always exist.
There is a project out there, the name escapes me, which modifies a set of INI files while will allow your chipset to be properly detected. The stock NVIDIA drivers then install without issue. Just be careful about future OEM driver updates that they are often incompatible. With a little Googling, I'm sure you can find the project in question.
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