Hardware Upgrade from a Dell Inspiron 1545 to a Dell Latitude 7480

It’s been a while since I posted anything related to PC on this website. I love to share useful information and I think some visitors to this website will appreciate this.

For a little more than two years I had been using a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop to update this website. It has a Pentium CPU, 4 gigabytes of DDR2 RAM. Some websites such as Facebook loaded very very slowly on it. At the time of this post, a Dell Inspiron 1545 is 11 years old!

A few months ago the monitor developed a black spot as you see in the photo below.

I had been using a much more powerful desktop PC to do my work. It has an Intel i5 CPU and 8 gigabytes of DDR3 RAM with twos HDDs one of which is an SSD. I stopped using it for my PC work when the monitor for it also developed bad pixels. I now use it only to view YouTubes and videos on a 52 inch Smart TV connected by an HDMI cable. It’s not easy to use it to do PC work with such a large screen.

It was time to get a new laptop. I considered buying an Apple MacBook Pro with an M1 ARM processor, but because of the expense and the fact the M1 is still relatively new which means a lot of software is not yet written for it, I opted to stay with a machine I could continue to use my favorite software on a Linux OS. My favorite distros are Linux Mint and Fedora.

I found a fantastic deal on eBay: A Dell Latitude 7480 with an Intel i7 CPU and 16 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM. And for only $399.00! And though this model is already 4 years old, the laptop was not used before! I can tell because there was no dust anywhere, and the battery is in pristine condition. It holds a charge for hours. The keyboard is great! The performance is great! You can find it here:

Click the image to see it on Ebay

This is a significant upgrade from the old Dell Inspiron! And the new laptop is much lighter, less than half the weight of the old Dell laptop.

I didn’t want to buy a laptop with Windows 10 but since it came with Windows, I decided not to get rid of the Windows installation altogether but install Linux with a dual boot. I did this because someday in the future I may give it to somebody else who may prefer Windows to Linux.

Windows 10 made it easy for me to shrink the Windows partition with its Disk Management tool to make room for Linux. I shrunk the Windows partition to a little less than half what it was and then installed Fedora 34 Linux from a DVD drive connected to a USB port and used automatic partitioning. It was so easy and the installation went without a hitch!