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I have recently added 4GB RAM, a 160GB Seagate 7200 HDD, and Vista Home Premium 32-bit. I'm enjoying them all. I like Vista better than I thought I would, and Vista LOVES all the horsepower in the 1710.

Woof. Haven't posted here in 2 years. Time flies and all that. I'm still enjoying my 1710\420\D-Dock combo. All are still going strong. Played the hell out of WOW-WotLK last winter, taking another break from that now. May upgrade the HDD one of these days as the 160 is getting filled and HDDs are cheaper now. I've pre-ordered Windows 7 for both laptops, though I haven't tried the Beta yet. Can't beat the intro price of $49. As much as I like cutting edge hardware et al I don't mind NOT having spent a bundle for 2 or 3 years and still get performance. Wouldn't mind stumbling across a "reasonably" priced 7600G cpu just so I could max this out, but not worth spending a lot of bucks for aging tech.

seagate's 7200.4 goes to 500GB 7200rpm
http://www.newegg.com/Product
/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148374&Tpk=7200.4

or if you can wait, the next-gen x25-m will provide insanely fast performance that iwll make any platter drive cry... same storage, about 200x more IOPS and a very flat R/W curve.

Jason

Thanks for the info. I bought a 320GB 7200 Hitachi at Microcenter for $79.95. It included an external USB case and cloning software. I put the new drive in the case and used the software to clone the old 160GB to the new 320GB. Then I swapped drives and the new drive boots just like the old one, with the added space as well as the original Dell recovery partitions and Media partition. One of the most painless conversions I've ever done. With my previous upgrade to 4GB of ram perhaps I'll install the 64-bit version of Windows 7 next autumn and be done with any further upgrades on this puppy. Still a lot of mileage for an "aging" laptop. The D420 is still humming as a mega-portable "netbook", even with only a 30GB HDD. It is really getting the mileage.

Wow, 500 GB at 7200 RPM for only $120! That seems cheap!

I believe Dell sales has the 500GB 7200RPM Seagate drives for about 85 before tax on there site.

I'm about to inherit one of these off a mate (XPS 1710). No idea of the specs... could be a T2600 or a T7600, or a 7900GS to a 7950GTX.

I'll keep things posted

My 1710 is still going strong after 3 1/2 years. I've upgraded from a T2500 to a T7600 (but not the G) and I now have the 320GB HDD.

Nice to hear. Would you want to update some benchmarks for us?

cheers ...

I won't be able to do that in the foreseeable future for about 50 different reasons, a few of which are: not doing much gaming currently, dismantling my D420, recovering from cancer surgery, Christmas is coming, u-name-it.

Those are good priorities

And knock-on-wood/best wishes for your recovery. My lady is doing the same at the moment

cheers ...

Thx much. Surgery appears to have been very successful. Best wishes back at ya' for you and your lady.

We will make it through, all of us

cheers ...

Wel it arrived and with some oven-baking loving, the laptop is going!

-Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit
-T2600 CPU
-Geforce 7900GTX 512MB (195.39 Drivers from here)
-2GB DDR2 SODIMM
-100GB 7200rpm HDD

Dead Gigabit LAN, dead Bluetooth though but I can't really knock back the fact that I have a free XPS m1710.

I'll have to look up how the benchies are done and put this thing through its paces with the new drivers, etc.

Cheers!

Congrats! Free is good! Mine originally came with a T2500 and an 80GB drive. I upgraded to a T7600. Wish I could have gotten the T7600G, overclockable, but they were\are hard to find and still a bit pricey. I went to a 160GB drive for awhile and recently to a 320GB drive.

Let us know how that Windows 7 works for you. I have one that I haven't put on yet. I put Win 7 on my D420 and it's working "fairly" well, except for a few blue screens and graphics driver probs! What a surprise.

Enjoy!