A few weeks ago I decided to pull my Dell XPS M1330 down off of a shelf (where it had been sitting for years) and see if it might be worth giving it some TLC. My oldest daughter, somehow now in high school, has been taking classes specifically working with Microsoft Office (and mainly Word and PowerPoint). As we’re mostly an iHouse, and my kids themselves have gotten very comfortable using their Chromebooks, we don’t really have an outlet for her to use Microsoft Office on a native Windows computer. Upd to this point we had been making use of Office 365 web app functionality, as well as the Microsoft Office copy I have on my MacBook Pro, but we really wanted to align what she’s using at school with what she might want to work on to finish assignments at home.
Enter the Dell XPS M1330 Project.
I started by attempting to boot the laptop up (would this thing even start up?). It booted up just fine, and a check of Windows Update showed that it had not downloaded / installed any updates since sometime in late 2013. So, first order of business was letting it sit and run for about 72 hours while it downloaded and applied 6 years of Windows operating system updates. Fun.
Once that was complete, I started trying out a few programs to get an idea of how well things would run. For someone who’s used to using their relatively quick Chromebook, any lag in response would feel like an eternity. I decided it was serviceable, and started poking around the hardware to see what might be available in terms of upgrades (and if it made sense to put any money into this thing). I decided on a new hard drive and memory from Crucial. Granted, the memory was more than I really wanted to invest, but I had the upgrade bug at this point. Also, keep in mind I had already replaced the battery that had long since gone bad.
After backing up any files that hadn’t already been backed up a long time ago, uninstalling a ton of programs no longer needed, and generally cleaning things up on the hard drive, I used the Acronis True Image utility recommended by Crucial to copy the old hard drive’s image to the new SSD (this probably took about 4 hours). I then removed the old hard drive and installed the new one and booted up. My Novabench score improved from a baseline of 334 to 372. Not too bad, and it felt like there as a noticeable improvement when programs were opened.
Next, I removed the 4GB of 667 speed DDR2 memory and installed the 8GB of 800 speed DDR2 memory to which the laptop promptly hung at the BIOS screen. Bummer. I had a feeling that it most likely had something to do not so much with moving to new memory, but rather moving from 4GB to 8GB of total memory. I removed one of the 4GB modules and powered back up which got me past the BIOS screen to a working desktop. A quick google search also led me to available BIOS updates available for the M1330. My BIOS was version A12, and I dowloaded and flashed the BIOS to the latest available: A15. I then rebooted the laptop to make sure it could progress past the BIOS screen, which it did, so I powered it down, re-installed the second memory module, and booted up to a successful windows desktop (and quicker, by the way).
A second try of Novabench reflected my benchmark score had improved to 414, so another 42 point jump after installing the memory. I’ll take it! For now, I’ve installed Office 365 on the laptop and it’s working really well, so overall I’m happy to have breathed some new life into this old Dell XPS M1330.
