Dell Vostro 3300

2020-06-05

• This laptop just does not end its life and I have decided to put it to use as a local Linux system to SSH into on the home network.
• I installed Ubuntu 22.04 and hooked it up by LAN cable to the wireless router. I had tried wifi and it was too slow in case I wanted to use RDP from Windows.
• For a SSH server, its fan was always ON and loud, all day and night. I first fixed this by using the CPUPower tool and setting the CPU governor to powersave and the CPU at the lowest 931 MHz.
• This mostly fixed the fan noise, though the fan would still be running even when the CPU was not hot or active. I searched and found that there was a BIOS update for this laptop released in 2014. Running this .exe file on Windows, upgraded my BIOS from A01 to A12.

2018-08-17

• The battery had been dying for a while now and it went fully dead.
• Got a replacement battery from NewEgg for $69.70 and the laptop was back as new.

2016-02-21

The laptop had started to shutdown due to CPU overheating and I fully disassembled it, cleaned the fans/vents and replaced the thermal paste. Details here.

2010-05-20

My new Dell Vostro 3300 laptop arrived yesterday. It took about 10 days from ordering online to delivery. This is my second laptop and will be replacing my 4-year old dinosaur Fujitsu S7021.

The Vostro 3300 ships with a Intel Core i3 330M (2.13 GHz) processor, 2GB RAM and 320 GB harddisk. The display is 13-inch widescreen. I will be using 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on this baby.

The top and side exterior is brushed metal and the rest is plastic. The lid is super thin and the sits sleekly over the nicely polished sides. The plastic surrounding the inside display looks a bit out of place in the middle of all this. The keyboard is chiclet and the font used for the keys is large and cute.