Dell Inspiron 1501 Notebook Reviews

Customer Ratings:

The best laptop I've EVER BOUGHT.GET THIS LAPTOP! The keyboard,screen,screen size,everything is perfect! I LOVE IT! 5 STARS.BRAVO!!!! When the laptop that i have right now (this model)breaks down,I'll buy it again!

Click Here For Most Helpful Customer Reviews >>

I purchased an Inspiron 1501 used last October. It actually worked fine for a few weeks... just long enough that I decided to spend some money on upgrades. The first upgrades I got were two 1 GB sticks of RAM and an aftermarket battery. Those went in easy enough. Next was a faster CPU, which also installed easily (for me anyway, but I'm not afraid to strip a laptop down to its chassis). I purchased an SSD for it, with which I had some difficulty installing. Not long after, I had to format the SSD and re install Windows.

The next upgrades were two 2 GB sticks of memory, which the computer's Radeon Xpress 1150 supports, and a Turion 64 X2 TL-68.

This is when the problems I was having went from aggravating to a total nightmare. I expected substandard performance with the stock Sempron 3500 and 512 MB of memory. I do not expect it from the fastest CPU the computer can take and eight times the stock memory.

The computer's audio had been skipping and stuttering from the start, but it turned terrible at this point. I went onto the Dell support forums and was told first it was caused by the video driver, then I was told it was a latency issues, then I was told it was a wifi issue, etc. The real whopper was when I was told it was caused by an Intel driver...this is an AMD machine! Hello, if the sound is skipping, then it stands to reason there's something wrong with the sound chip! Long story short, the support forums over at Dell were almost totally useless. Each time I tried one of their suggestions (some didn't work), the problem would disappear for a day or two and then it would slowly being to get worse and worse until it was back in full.

I recently got the computer to run for a week without audio problems of any kind, then it began locking up at random. Sometimes the audio would stutter until I did anything to the computer (pull a plug, touch the touchpad, etc.), but just in the last 24 hours the screen has been going funky. The only way to re start from this is to hold the power switch down until the machine shuts completely off.

I've been building and maintaining my own computers for 13 years now. I'm literate with Windows, Linux, and Mac OS alike. I've beaten more software problems that I can remember in both Windows AND Linux. If I can't fix a computer problem, then it's probably not fixable, and I just can't seem to fix the Inspiron 1501.