Sandy Bridge

That's pretty impressive! I'll admit that as someone who hasn't done any astronomy I skipped ahead to the photos, and then went off to the text. But some of those pictures, especially the ones of the stars, look like they could be professional. I'm not really into astronomy myself, beyond a one-off night of visual astronomy a few years ago, and seeing the fruits of a friend's efforts during a total solar eclipse a few years ago, with a regular single-lens reflex camera. I learned about astrophotography a few months ago from a friend whose boyfriend does it, but it's more impressive seeing the pictures on my desktop here than on her phone. But he goes out into the country for the astrophotography; from your telescope pictures it looks like you aren't really out in the middle of nowhere? There look to be so many street lights in the background, I wouldn't have thought you could get that good of photographs! You've also reminded me that there's an observatory up the road from my new dwelling that I haven't checked out yet, but it looks like they have near-weekly public programs. That would make for a fun change of pace on a Friday night.

Jack Reacher. Decent, but not amazing. In a theater? No Time to Die. Still not entirely sure about it, beyond it's better than Quantum of Solace and not as good as Casino Royale. I'm unsure beyond that primarily due to being exhausted when I saw it. Too much action in real life to pay full attention to the action film!

Let's say laptops that you have used for general-purpose computing in the past two weeks. Not so much interested in what you upgraded in 1997, unless you're still using that 1997 laptop today. I know a lot of our forum members like to upgrade their laptops, but what are they upgrading? --------- I have two laptops in semi-frequent use. On the newer one, I've only upgraded the storage so far, although it is likely to receive a memory upgrade in the not-too-distant future. On the older one, which still sees use on the couch or in the kitchen, I've upgraded storage, memory, CPU, and screen. Probably going to add some ExpressCard upgrades later this year, including USB 3.0 ports, but I'm unlikely to upgrade its optical drive even though I could, and already have the most powerful compatible GPU. (moderators, any way to make the poll results be out of percentage of users voting for an option instead of percentage of votes cast? it seems to be doing the latter right now)

I am going to have to read this in detail when I have more time! From what I have read... shouldn't 2240 be 2242? I never knew that mSATA was noticeably smaller than 2240/2242. No wonder one of my friends thought mSATA drives were great for mobile external storage.

Nice!!! That "ATI Video Card" must have been the FirePro M7820, right? A good card for its time but no 970M in performance. I have one of these awaiting repairs; the motherboard seems to have died. I was the second owner and used it from 2014 - 2018, which admittedly was a relatively light laptop usage period for me. But it gave me a lot more mobile power than my previous Dell, which was great for its primary use case of LANs at friend's places. One friend even made the same upgrade to an 8740w in early 2015. I never wound up kitting it out to its maximum though; it still has its stock 250 GB or 320 GB HDD, 4 GB RAM, original CPU. How did you go about the GPU upgrade, the heatsink in particular? From what I've read those often need to be trimmed down to size, which is an area where I have neither the tools nor the expertise.

I actually kind of like the dumb bullet pointed list. It takes awhile to load on the larger ones (e.g. Dell, where it's > 10 MB), but it's really nice being able to find all the threads related to my laptop very quickly once it loads. There are tradeoffs; if I remember who started a thread but not the title it doesn't help much. But in the short to medium term (until sorting of the forum-view display, perhaps?), I'd encourage leaving them up as an option. Regex work... kudos on proficiency with that. For me, if I have a problem, and I think, "I could solve this with regexes", then I usually wind up with two problems.

Probably 90% of my game time is in the strategy genre, at least if you define it broadly to include such things as business simulators. There are times that I want something more mindless, but most of the time I want to have something to think about and consider in my games. Within the strategy genre, the three mainstays that have stood the test of time for me are Europa Universalis IV (and Paradox games in general), Civilization (III and IV, but I don't like V), and Railroad Tycoon (II and III). I'll play a lot of other strategy games, too, but those are the perennials. Either EU4 or Civ III is my all-time most played game, although in both cases I've played them enough that I often have to play with some self-imposed limits to make it more interesting nowadays. Railroad Tycoon drew me back in heavily this fall, including playing some community-created scenarios that I'd never played before. For just relaxing some evening? It's hard to beat Killing Floor 2, or the original in the series for that matter. I also recently revisited Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and the mechanics still hold up well. I'm played out on the Halo series, although I played tons of Halo: Combat Evolved on PC back in the day. Probably my favorite map there was Boarding Action, where there was a void between two battlecruisers in space, with three (five?) stories on each cruiser, an open area to shoot across the void, and teleporters to go back and forth between the sides. Play it with two players, with snipers and the overpowered pistols, sneaking around carefully, always worried your rival would come up from behind and assassinate you with their pistol, yet equally concerned they'd spot you from across the void and headshot you. I'd play it with a friend late at night, sometimes with a typically-silent voice chat as well, and the tension was palpable. It could be several minutes before one of us found the other. Similarly I doubt I'll ever go back to Rocket League since they moved Snow Day to competitive. I loved Rocket League hockey in casual mode, but the wait times for finding a new game are significantly higher on competitive, and that kills the pacing.

Currently listening to The Best of Blondie, and this is the most interesting song from the compilation that I hadn't known previously.

Great to hear! Yeah, mine is at 4 GB (3.5 GB usable in 32-bit Windows), and I'm not sure I'll ever bump it to 6 GB. It's mostly a legacy gaming/software compatibility testing platform at this point, although I will remote desktop onto my desktop and use it on the couch from time to time. The Linux dual-boot could benefit from 6 GB, but I haven't had the best luck getting it to cooperate with the 8600M GT (Mint 18 was laggy, Mint 20 isn't laggy but seems to be unstable, although that may have been related to my failing screen). So, I haven't been running anything intensive enough in Linux to benefit from the extra RAM, either. I added a CPU section to the upgrade options just now, with way too much information, including the top speeds I've been able to hit on this laptop. I'm curious if anyone has been able to beat them. I'd love to see someone be able to hit a 50% boost in CPU speed over the maximum option the 1520 ever shipped with, but I'm really not sure if it's possible given thermal constraints, especially in dual-core mode.

That Asus was indeed the one available locally. Great information on the two of them. I'm wondering now why I didn't wind up buying this laptop, rather than my MSI. Looking at some reviews and the archived thread, it looks like probably the most important reason was that I bought my MSI in November, 2018, and the Helios with the 2700 was juuust starting to arrive around that time. So I may not have realized that I'd have another Ryzen octo-core option by waiting another couple weeks. Although I'd already been traveling for work with an 11-year-old laptop for two months at that point, and I recall that I wanted to go AMD but just couldn't find an option with a good CPU (Ryzen-based with > 4 cores, and not jet-engine loud), so I decided to throw in the towel on waiting for AMD to finally get their act together with laptops. I also preferred to try out the soft aspects of the design in-person; so many laptops have hard edges that bother my wrists these days, or bad keyboard layouts. My MSI is great in both of these regards, and the Helios looks pretty good too. Maybe I would have found it and loved it at Micro Center in another couple months, but while I'm sure I'd read about it in the summer of 2018, I couldn't wait forever. Finally, I was still skeptical of Acer's reputation given what it had been in the late 2000s. It sounds like they may have turned a corner on that; one of my mates has a 1070 Acer laptop and it's been remarkably reliable. But if you'd told me in 2017 that Acer would build a Ryzen laptop that was all-around better than Asus, I probably wouldn't have believed you without a lot of data to back it up. The other weird and unexpected thing is that this Acer may have beat my MSI in mobile battery life, despite its desktop processor. My MSI can have pretty unimpressive battery life when it's not idle (sometimes only a bit over two hours), and requires disassembly to swap batteries. From reading the Predator thread, it sounds like its battery is swappable without disassembly, just like my old Dell. So while the 90-minute battery life is worse, because it's swappable I could effectively have as long or longer battery life while unplugged. Yeah, I think this would have worked well for my use case - traveling for work by car, mostly using it for web surfing, gaming, or development at the hotel at night, occasionally taking it to a coffee shop in the evening, and taking it to a friend's house for LAN games. Not that the MSI I bought really wound up being lacking in power for what I need; it's perfectly fine. But if the timeline had differed by a couple months, I may have actually been able to replace both my laptop and my desktop by buying this laptop. It is a bummer that it can't be upgraded to newer generations of Ryzens. Isn't upgrading the CPU half the fun of having a socketed processor in a laptop? Did it make sense for me to upgrade my Core 2 Duo to a Core 2 Extreme in my old Dell? Well, not really, it took its battery life from bad to worse, so now I always carry a spare battery to swap in when I take it on the road, the performance increase isn't necessarily worth the battery life hit, and being able to fry an egg on it is a feature I haven't taken advantage of. But I'm glad I could upgrade it! Have they come out with a Ryzen 3000/5000 successor? There's a 50% chance I'll be upgrading my desktop in the second half of this year, and if there is a successor to this laptop, it might be worth considering going that route instead.

Well, that motivated me to dig into the history files, and it turns out you are right! In post #61 of the thread "Inspiron 1720 with 6 GB RAM Tested", frenchglen documented his unsuccessful attempt to upgrade to 8 GB. No one was able to prove otherwise in the remaining 32 posts of that thread. I'll update the post above, and link to the source when the time for that arrives.

In another thread, @Ishatixmentioned, This got me thinking, that would be a good discussion topic! How do you tweak your taskbar, and what programs do you use to do so? I'm not sure I have any taskbar-tweaking programs on my Win8.1/Win10 computers, although having a double row of windows sounds intriguing, and I really should try having the taskbar on the side again! I'm constantly running out of space to read which programs I have open. I still have Taskix on my legacy system on its XP install, which lets you reorder windows on the taskbar (now present in later versions of Windows by default), as well as other features such as middle-click on the taskbar closing programs (I still kind of miss that one, now it opens a new window by default). But I guess the reordering was what I really installed it for, and now that it's present by default (except in groups of the same program's windows), I haven't felt compelled to re-install it. Any other cool programs we should all know about?

The word "organic" as Reciever mentioned fits it really well. I don't know @Aaron44126outside of January at NBR/EFGXT, but posted in his progress thread with what I'd done and (probably?) some links to my in-progress work showing that it really worked. My archiving application is indeed homebrewed, using a Java library that I'd encountered at a previous job and found to be pretty handy for web crawling, but beyond that being custom for XenForo. Its initial job was archiving threads, though not whole forums, and fixing broken hotlinked images where possible (if you know of any good ImageShack archives, or archives of other defunct image-hosting sites, please message me). But it became clear that Aaron had the most progress towards the shared goal so far, and it didn't take much longer to realize he had the server-side knowledge and hardware to make it happen in a way that my experience didn't lend itself to nearly as well. The funny thing is that I'd been mostly inactive at NBR for so long, that I didn't recognize @Recievereither. Maybe with the right post, with an old avatar, a lightbulb would go off, but from what I've read about his NBR timelines, it's equally possible that he became active about the same time that I became fairly inactive. But it became clear fairly quickly that he'd built a good reputation over the years when I was only visiting once in a blue moon. I think the fatigue from not enough sleep is finally starting to settle in - I stayed up all night last night re-running edge cases to get a more complete archive, and I'm surprised the few hours of sleep I caught after NBR went down lasted as long as they did. Hopefully Reciever can catch up on sleep as well - I don't know how he managed to get anything done while moving. I moved in December and didn't even get the Internet set up for a few days, let alone find a mouse built after 1992 in my boxes, or have time to dabble in any of my side projects.

Do you mean that the thread in the archive you linked to once had 255 pages on NBR? Or was there a second thread about the same laptop? If it's the former, then I don't know what went on, by the time either of us got around to it there were 1345-1350 pages (depending on the day last week). If it's the latter, there's a very good chance it's in the archive, although perhaps not yet fully live. --------- I actually kind of remember this notebook. I think it was this Acer and an Asus that had desktop Ryzen 2000 CPUs. The Asus was cheaper, IIRC, and if one of them, I think the Asus, was at my local Micro Center. I was sorely tempted to buy it but all reports were that it was louder than a jet engine when it was really ripping through threads and running the GPU. I couldn't find a good web benchmark to test it with in its showroom status, but in the end passed on it as super noisy fans do tend to bother me; I returned a Radeon 290 (or was it 290X) for that reason. Still love the idea of a true desktop replacement like this though. Just not sure I'd be happy with one due to thermals/required fan speeds, in practice.

Not surprisingly, I wasn't looking at individual threads much while working on the larger efforts, although in the first few days when it was far from certain those efforts would reach as far as they did, the forums which corresponded to laptops I own - Dell, MSI, and HP Business Class - were a priority. But there were countless useful posts in Hardware and Windows over the years, and even remembering all of them - many of which I referred to about a decade ago - would have been impossible. I figured those were lost, as those forums were so large, and there was already so much to cover in the Manufacturer forums, that getting to them seemed impossible. Had that been the case, I likely would have one-off archived the ThrottleStop Guide, but that's about it. But this thread also got me wondering, what did I archive years ago? So I looked through my MHTML archives locally. I found some interesting stuff that showed my interests over the years - getting > 4 GB RAM on 32-bit Win7, GNU/Linux info for a '90s laptop, replacing CMOS batteries in old PCs. But the only NBR thread I found was "How to Enable Intel Dynamic Acceleration (IDA) on Both Cores of a Core 2 Duo" by unclewebb. This used ThrottleStop, and I very much remember how cool it was to be able to hit 2.4 GHz on both threads! But I'm surprised that's the only one. Why didn't I save "Kind of a Guide: How to Bake Your GPU for Fun and for Profit!", which I knew I'd need some day? Why had I never saved off a copy of the ultimate upgrade guides for my laptops? I'm still planning to upgrade my 2007 Inspiron to heights it has never reached before! Just waiting for the parts to arrive! I suppose part of the conclusion must be that NBR seemed like a stable resource, whereas many of the resources I did save are from sites or blogs that I don't recognize; I didn't know if they'd still be there in a year. I'm sure if I dig up an old Opera bookmarks file from that time period, there will be some NBR bookmarks in there. But few NBR threads made it onto my hard drive.

I should also call out that if it hadn't been for Charles Jefferies, I never would have known NBR was going down until whenever I next came across it in a search result or thought to swing by, which could well have been months from now. Pieces fell into place. Charles messaged NBR members about the site going down, I saw that message, saw Aaron's progress, realized that a program I'd written for another forum could be modified and re-applied to the task, and was able to help speed things up as a result. But without that message from Charles, maybe an equal amount of data would have been archived, but maybe not. And without his messages, surely dozens and more likely hundreds of other members wouldn't have learned what was going on until months down the line. I'd definitely understand if he wants to take some time off, and is exhausted by the events of the past few weeks. But I'm hopeful that someday he will choose to re-appear at one or more of the successor forums.

Upgrade Options This post will be edited to link out to more resources about upgrade options over time. Initially, I'm writing this largely from memory, but I hope to be able to add more formal sources as times goes on. Much of this information was initially compiled by Mihael Keel in the thread Dell Inspiron 1520- Viable After Market Upgrades. Memory The 1520 only officially supports 4 GB of memory, but unofficially work with up to 6 GB (4 + 2). The 1720 also supports up to 6 GB. I do not recall whether the 1420/1400 work with more than 4 GB, and have not seen as conclusive of evidence regarding the 1700/1500; please let us know if they do! The Intel Santa Rosa platform that the 1520 and its siblings use is limited to 667 MHz DDR2; you will find pin-compatible 800 MHz DIMMs, but they will not run at that speed on a Santa Rosa laptop, so there is no point in spending extra for 800 MHz. I am not sure whether the 1521 (AMD variant) will take full advantage of the 800 MHz DIMMs. If you are running 32-bit Windows XP (and likely Vista/7/etc.), the maximum memory the 1520 can use is 3.5 GB, as tested with the nVIDIA GPU. This is actually quite good; many systems are limited to a smaller amount with 32-bit Windows. The maximum amount may be somewhat different with the integrated Intel GPU. Additional Sources: "Inspiron 1720 with 6GB RAM Tested", by SomeFormOfHuman, Oct 1, 2008 (link to be added when available). Graphics The 1520 came with two motherboard variants, one for integrated graphics and one for dedicated graphics. You cannot upgrade to dedicated graphics if you have the integrated graphics mobo without swapping motherboards; similarly if you have the dGPU mobo and your graphics card dies, you must either procure a replacement graphics card or swap to an integrated graphics motherboard. The dedicated graphics motherboard supports two GPUs - an 8400M GS with 128 MB DDR2, and an 8600M GT with 256 MB DDR32. Sadly, the 1520 did not ship with the faster GDDR3 version of the 8600M GT as some competing laptops did - the difference being 700 MHz memory clocks for GDDR3 versus 400 MHz for DDR2; both shared the same 475 MHz core clocks at stock. I have not read of anyone successfully swapping in a different GPU; if you know of someone doing that and documenting it, please let us know. At the time of release, the 8600M GT DDR2 was bested in the mobile space only by the 7950 GTX, 7900 GS, 8700M GT, and 8600M GT GDDR3; the 8800M did not debut until nearly six months later. Thus, the 1520 is blessed with the possibility for powerful graphics for its time. However, both of the nVIDIA GPUs the Inspiron 1520 supports suffer from the bumpgate problem, which in short means that they will die an early death. Given that this laptop is now nearly 15 years old, I'm not sure how many are left. But due both to Bumpgate and the fact that a dedicated card from 2007 does not feel very fast anymore, I recommend anyone looking to pick up a 1520 to go with the integrated graphics option today. Still, all is not as bad as it could be; the 1520 has fairly robust cooling, and perhaps due to using DDR2 instead of GDDR3, the temperatures reached are typically fairly modest, somewhat mitigating the effects of Bumpgate compared to more powerful, hotter-running laptops. The key contribution to failure is cycling between cool and hot temperatures, so if your laptop never gets that hot - and stays cool when not actively using the GPU - that is better than one that warms up even at idle, or that heats up significantly even with a moderate workload. All in all, I'm only on my second GPU, and my laptop is over 14 years old. The first one started artifacting more and more frequently before it had to be retired; the first one occasionally causes its drivers to fail due to hardware issues, but is still largely usable. Baking Your GPU If your GPU does fail, you can fix it for a period of time by baking it in your oven. That's right, just like cookies! The theory is that by heating it to the right temperature for the right period of time, the cracked solder from Bumpgate will re-flow, re-establishing the integrity the GPU has lost over time (this is a simplification; see the Bumpgate link for more details). If you heat the GPU at too hot of a temperature, however, you will melt additional components, so caution must be taken. I will look up the details of this process when possible, but the gist is you remove all meltable components (cooling pads, etc.) from the GPU, place it on foil on a cookie sheet, heat the oven to a certain temperature (I want to say 275F, but don't quote me on that), and heat it for a short period of time (8 minutes?). Then take it out, let it cool, and fire it up. If it worked, the artifacting you were having should be gone. If you overdid it, you may not have a working video card anymore. If you underdid it, you can try again for a somewhat longer period of time or somewhat higher temperature. Good ventilation is recommended, and you may wish to clean your oven before baking cookies again. The fix is not reported to be permanent, but if it works should buy you some time on the order of months to decide what to do next. I've read of some people who've done this process more than once on the same card, although the amount of time it buys on the second go-round is generally considerably less than the first time through the oven. Overclocking Your GPU Due to the GeForce 8 Series' proclivity for an early death, combined with its heightened sensitivity to thermal stress compared to other GPUs, I do not recommend overclocking your 1520's dedicated GPU. However, if you must, you can. I'm sure there are many applications you can use to do so, but back when I was eager enough to ignore prudence and chase higher FPS numbers, I used RivaTuner to do so; nTune was also popular back in the day. The thread "Highest 8600m GT Overclock" covers Inspiron 1520/1720 overclocking. 650 MHz core/530 MHz RAM (versus 475/400 stock) seems to be a fairly common high overclock, although I'd recommend working your way up to those clocks; I know that on my original GPU, for example, the memory couldn't overclock nearly that high. CPU Upgrades The 1520's CPU, along with that of all its Intel siblings, is socketed, as all processors should be. That means you can upgrade it! The processors that are compatible are the Merom (65nm) and Penryn (45nm) Socket P processors running with an 800 MHz or slower front side bus. Penryn processors will consume less power and run cooler, but all the stock processors were Merom processors. The highest-performing stock processor at launch was the T7500; the 1720 shipped with the T7700. ----- For Merom, the compatible 35W processors are listed below, grouped by L2 cache size and FSB. T5000-series processors lack support for Intel Virtualization Technology (VT-x). The processors in bold were options when ordered the 1520 new. 2 MB L2 cache, 667 MHz FSB: T5250 (1.5 GHz), T5450 (1.67 GHz), T5550 (1.83 GHz), T5750 (2 GHz), T5850 (2.17 GHz) 2 MB L2 cache, 800 MHz FSB: T5270 (1.4 GHz), T5470 (1.6 GHz), T5670 (1.8 GHz), T7100 (1.8 GHz), T5800 (2 GHz), T5870 (2 GHz), T7250 (2 GHz), T5900 (2.2 GHz) 4 MB L2 cache, 800 MHz FSB: T7300 (2 GHz), T7500 (2.2 GHz), T7700 (2.4 GHz), T7800 (2.6 GHz) From Penryn, the compatible processors all have an 800 MHz FSB, and are: 3 MB L2 cache: T8100 (2.1 GHz), T8300 (2.4 GHz) 6 MB L2 cache: T9300 (2.5 GHz), T9500 (2.6 GHz) There are also three Core 2 Extreme processors available. It's worth noting that, at least in the Merom range, these cannot be undervolted as much as the non-Extreme processors; I can only set my X7900 as low as 1.1V, even at 1.2 GHz, whereas my T7500 could go as low as 0.85V. The Extreme processors also appear to lack Super Low Frequency Mode (SLFM), which allows halving the frequency. Between these two difference, the net effect is that idle power usage is significantly higher with the Core 2 Extreme processors, and you will not get as good of battery life as with a properly-undervolted non-Extreme processor. Merom X7800 (2.6 GHz) and X7900 (2.8 GHz), both with 4 MB L2 cache. Penryn X9000 (2.8 GHz) with 6 MB L2 cache. ---- So, with 24 choices, what processor should you choose? If you have one of the slowest ones and just want a cheap upgrade, consider the T7300 or T8100. These are available for less than $10 shipped on eBay, and are going to be a huge boost over the T5250 and a noticeable one over the T5450. The T7700 and T8300 are available for $15 or less, and will give you a roughly 20% boost over the T7300. The T7800, X7800, X7900, and T9300 all run about $30, and will be another step up. The X7900 only makes sense if it's the same price as the X7800, as both are unlocked. The T9300 is arguably the best choice here with larger cache likely being more beneficial than the T7800's extra 100 MHz, and cooler running to boot. The X-series CPUs may beat the T9300 in performance when clocked at 2.8 GHz, depending on the application, but will run much hotter, at the cost of battery life. The T9500 is running about $50, which is not worth it over the T9300. The X9000 tends to carry a significant premium as the best possible processor for a large range of laptops, and is almost never worth it from a value standpoint. I do not see any available for sale right now. In summary, I'd argue the processors listed in bolds above are the rational choices, depending on how much you want to spend. The Core 2 Extremes and T9500 will have the best performance, but are not worth the battery life tradeoffs (in the case of the Extremes) and price difference in the case of the T9500, over the T9300. It's also worth noting that if a 1520 with a T9300 isn't fast enough for what you need today, you probably should be considering a newer laptop as the solution rather than the modest bump a faster compatible processor would give you. How Fast Can the 1520 Go? The absolute fastest processor is the X9000. It stocks at 2.8 GHz, and is unlocked. But can you overclock the X9000 given the 1520's cooling system? I don't have an X9000 to test with, but I do have the next-best thing, an X9000. In the case of the X9000, the fastest speed the 1520 can handle for both cores is 2.8 GHz - the stock speed, with Arctic Silver cooling compound. Perhaps with exotic cooling mods or IC Diamond, 3 GHz could be hit. But at 2.8 GHz, the temperatures reached the mid-90s, and even if the voltage could be bumped to make 3 GHz stable, there is not enough thermal headroom to run it. With one core disabled in the BIOS, the X7900 with Arctic Silver can reach 3.2 GHz in the 1520, giving a maximum single-threaded performance of a full gigahertz higher than any stock option! In practice, this is unlikely to ever make sense over the 2.8 GHz dual-core option, but if you really need maximal single-threaded performance in a 1520, that is an option. My best guess would be the X9000 might give one more multiplier of performance (200 MHz), if you're lucky two (400 MHz). I'd love to see someone test this, and would also be curious if higher-end thermal compound makes a difference. But for now, I haven't read of anyone exceeding these speeds on the 1520 - do feel free to try! More Sections to Be Added Optical, storage, wireless, finding good batteries for the 1520 so you can take it with you wherever you go even in the 2020s (yes, my 1520 still visits coffee shops!).

One of the most popular Dell laptops of 2007, along with the likes of the XPS M1530 and XPS M1330, the 1520 is sibling to the Inspiron 1420 and 1720, and cousin to the Vostro 1400, 1500, and 1700, as well as the AMD-equipped Inspiron 1421, 1521, and 1721. Does anyone else still run one of these? Back when they were new we'd have threads for each of them, but considering it's almost 15 years later, I'd welcome any of them into the stable. I recently swapped the display on mine, and still use it semi-frequently. I love the design. Rounded edges that don't annoy the wrists. Full-size arrow keys, as well as a num pad and page up/page down/home/end. Front media keys that don't work quite as well as they did new, but have great features such as previous track/next track. Why don't new laptops have those dedicated media keys? Not even many dedicated keyboards have them, but they're great. My goal for this thread is camaraderie, knowledge sharing, and probably transforming the second post into a knowledge warehouse. I can never hope to get as technical on the hardware level as some of the true experts in that realm, but I have replaced pretty much every part on this laptop over the years. I like to joke that the modem is the only original part, but that might actually be true. Former owners of the model also welcome, especially if they somewhat reminisce about its weighty, yet sturdy and well-thought-out design.

Some early statistics on what I archived - uncompressed, and excluding common JavaScript and CSS files, it weighs in at 45.5 GB. This includes extant images, including those that were hotlinked from other sites, as they were included in the archive. I was not the only archiver, so the overall total will be higher than that. 7-Zipped, what I archived totals 25.7 GB, including somewhat duplicated JS/CSS. Once more, the total will be higher once others' efforts are included. Including downloads of other archival efforts (the Clevo JSON one above and some Internet Archive efforts), I am 201.6 GB poorer in disk space than a week ago, directly attributable to this archiving. Although this includes having duplication across both compressed and uncompressed copies. I don't plan to keep everything in both compressed and uncompressed copies forever, likely only keeping the data most relevant to my laptops as uncompressed.

Interesting; I shouldn't be surprised that someone else has worked on XenForo specific backups, but I hadn't heard of that project before. His code looks much neater than mine, although my code looked much less ramshackle two weeks ago, before the recent fast-paced additions. The MSI section should be less than half the size of Sager, in my archives it was roughly 33-40% of the size. So it depends on what degree of "way" smaller you mean as to whether that sounds expected or not.

There also was - I would argue clearly - not a business vision for NBR at TechTarget anymore. No reviews had been published since 2019; no notable new investments had been made in years. At a larger company, if a division that is unprofitable or break-even wants to continue to exist more than a year or two, it needs to have a champion that believes in it and has a vision for it. There didn't appear to be anyone who fit that bill at TechTarget, although we've read Charles was able to persuade them to keep the lights on - probably indicating it was break even/low-profit/a small enough loss to not be very noticeable. I'm reminded of a local grocery chain that was owned by a large, diversified company, and had been for decades. They lost a small amount of money every year, by the parent company's standards - a few million per year in losses. The locals thought it was a great chain, but it was somewhat a specialty one, so most people only bought some things there, not all their groceries - maybe why it lost money. Anyway, the grocery division's leader was able to convince them to keep it around, probably by appealing to the goodwill it brought the parent company's brand name, and to old time's sake. But about a year after he retired, they announced they were closing the grocery chain. I could see a similar situation having played out here. Maybe there was someone sympathetic to the argument of keeping the lights on, but they left TechTarget last year. Maybe TechTarget's profitability went down over the past few years and their bean counters started looking in more detail for what could be cut and saw a no-longer-profitable division. We'll probably never know the answer for sure. But having worked at a large, conglomerated company once (by way of acquisition of the company I worked for, not by choice), this seems a lot more likely to me than anything more dramatic. Jobs and divisions get cut all the time at large soulless corporations. It's why I prefer to work for small companies.

IMO, the likely scenario is that NBR and its siblings were either not profitable anymore, or not profitable enough, for what had become a large company. Large companies, especially ones that are composed of multiple sub-companies and have Merger & Acquisition teams, tend to look at things through very high-level, bottom-line-and-margin driven viewpoints. Read enough article on CNBC, and you'll see that these sorts of companies will discontinue one of their divisions because it only had a 10% margin, and they want their divisions to have 30% margins. Never mind that a 10% margin is still profit. It could also have been the case that NBR, as a division, was profitable as-is, but may have required server maintenance at some point that, at least once the cost of labor was factored in, made that no longer be the case. To use an analogy from The Office, the Michael Scott Paper Co can make money as long as its costs never increase, but if its costs increase at some point, it's not viable any more.

I downloaded it on the 28th after seeing your post at our old home, but didn't have time to dive too deeply into it with the focus on all the other forums as well. But it's definitely handy, especially if we find gaps that it can fill in. We don't know of any yet, but haven't been able to take too fine-toothed of a comb to what we have yet. I'm curious what you used for creating it? The tools we were using were focused on a human-consumable format, but I could see JSON being more directly consumable if the goal were having it as an input to another computer program or database, and sometimes that's what I'm looking for.

Well, everything I archived has been uploaded to Aaron's server. Including compressed copies as well as uncompressed, and some unnecessary duplication of JavaScript and CSS, it's over 100 GB. Please be patient as there are a lot of things to be organized and matched up - and the pace of the past week is not sustainable over the long term! It's been a fun time preserving the knowledge. I knew my XenForo program could be extended to back up larger amounts of data, and had fortuitously taught it to traverse forums in mid January, but never planned to teach it new tricks at such a breakneck speed. But I told some friends that I needed something to keep me busy on the 21st, and what do you know I learn about NBR going down on the 22nd, and all of a sudden I had something to keep me busy for the rest of January. It's been a team effort as well. With only my own local resources and motivation, a couple orders of magnitude less would have been preserved. Aaron's thread in the Precision forums was key in organizing and building momentum, and seeing various people asking about archiving/preservation across the forums was also important from a motivation standpoint. It wasn't always glamorous or fast-paced, queuing up backups of huge forums that took hours - I think my longest-running one was 30 hours. Yet towards the end, with a significant but rapidly dwindling amount of small things left to grab, and running on a lack of sleep and fast-paced music, it was great fun. We were so close to reaching our last known threads to grab - partial archives were made of those last five - but compared to what looked likely a week ago, I'm chuffed with the result.

IIRC, that is true for OLEDs. A black part of a screen on an OLED requires essentially zero energy, so white/green/etc. text on a black background is very efficient, whereas that isn't the case for dark text on a light background. My Nokia 808 took advantages of this to display screensavers including notification icons that were colors on a black background - essentially, the screen was always "on", but because 90% of it was black, it took very little energy. I could get five days battery life with the OLED screen "on" all the time, with light usage. Whether that's true for traditional LEDs, or older CCFL-powered laptop displays, I don't know. Seems unlikely for CCFL, since the bulb would still have to be on to have any illumination at all - my old laptop's CCFL bulb died recently, and it was almost impossible to read the screen without that illumination. But maybe, maybe not for traditional, non-organic LEDs. I know of one forum that stuck with vBulletin and is now on vBulletin 5, but indeed all the other ones I frequent (and knew what they were running) switched to XenForo either directly from VB3, or after trying VB4 as NBR did.