Adventure with Dell Latitude D620

OtakuN3rd

I recently got a Dell Latitude D620 in part of a trade deal. I traded two working laptops (Dell Inspiron 6000 and a circa 2002 IBM Thinkpad) for a stack of broken laptops. Among them is my Dell Latitude D620, a Core Duo system (NOT Core 2 Duo). I was told the guy installed Ubuntu on it but it was getting really hot and the fan wasn't running. I figured, double-check the connections, possibly order new fan, clean heatsink, and use it. That's when I discovered it has Nvidia Quadro graphics - a known "bad bump" chipset. Well, crap. I looked on ebay for intel graphics-based motherboards and found them rather affordable (I figured they might have been in relatively high demand to replace burnt-out nvidia boards). In the searching, though, I also noticed that the heatsink on Nvidia models was different than what was in mine - it had another heat pipe on it. Well... I thought, that explains a lot. I went ahead and scooped up a proper heatsink and replacement fan for this system since the graphics chip is still in operating condition. With the replacement heatsink assembly, I used copper shims cut from a piece of sheet copper I picked up at my local Lowe's store and Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste. All seems to be good for now, no real stress testing done at this point, but I like the layout and look of this system (despite my general dislike for Dell computers). When I first installed LXLE it did get scorching hot, but a BIOS update later and the more active fan policy made a big difference. In addition to the heatsink issue, I had to get a proper hard drive caddy and mini PCIe wi-fi card as the computer had been stripped of them in the past. I also used a bigger hard drive than what the previous owner had. He had a 20GB hard drive in it that apparently came out of an Xbox 360, I pulled an 80GB drive out of an external enclosure I have and swapped it with the 20GB drive. The mini PCIe wi-fi card I used was one I pulled out of a dead Acer Aspire 5050 series I got back in 2007 (the one I used to have in my signature was a different one that I sold yesterday). Its an Atheros 802.11b/g chipset.

Zaka

Wow, that's a great deal of effort for a working laptop ~ but you get points for persistence!

OtakuN3rd

Thanks! I fix laptops as a hobby and I enjoyed the challenge of this D620 (I am posting from it right now). My other current and near-future projects include an HP Pavilion DV6-3000 series (it overheated, I re-flowed the solder using the towel trick and used copper shims to bring it back to life, but I still need a hard drive for it), a Dell Latitude D600 (complete rebuild), a Compaq Presario X1000 (Want to do processor upgrade), and a another processor upgrade on my Thinkpad R51.

For the Thinkpad and the Compaq I am looking at 2GHz Pentium M chips since the 2.1Ghz are crazy expensive, else I have some 1.6Ghz chips with 2Mb L2 cache. Both are limited to using 400Mhz FSB chips, which is sad since I have a 2.16Ghz 533 chip.

Zaka

I have two thinkpads: an R-61 and a T-400. I've upgraded memory for both, but keep an eye out for replacement parts ~ eBay is a great source for parts, either ad-hoc or dead rigs to be used for parts.

OtakuN3rd

That's definitely true! I've had to get power supplies and hard drive caddies off there for several of the rigs I have. I have about 5 more dead Thinkpads (various models, all pre-lenovo), and have sold another working one. Many items are being shipped from China with dirt-cheap prices and free shipping. For example, the hard drive caddy for the Latitude D600 I have was a mere $0.99.

Howdy, Stranger!

Categories