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Dell XPS M1710: Finally Holding My Childhood Dream Machine!

This article is a transcript of a video that you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below. Hence, certain statements may not make sense in this text form, and watching the video instead is recommended.

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Intro

Now that I was looking at Dells, I realized it was time to finally look for that one machine I used to have on my desktop wallpaper back in the 2010s. It wasn’t a modern machine back in the day by any means, but now that I had better sources, I knew exactly where to seek it and finally get my hands on one. Coincidentally, it was from the same year as the XPS M1210 we saw in the last video. So here is a gaming notebook from another time, the Dell XPS M1710.

My Childhood Dream

I’ve talked about my fascination with older Dell XPS and Alienware notebooks and one of the clear commonalities between these two lineups that would attract a younger me from the 2010s was the lights. But this isn’t just another one of those machines, but instead a special one! Having it in front of me in person, instead of seeing it on a computer screen was priceless. I can’t be grateful enough to finally have had the honor to live that moment when I unpacked the eBay package and turned this thing ON for the first time. I even played the 2001 Space Odyssey theme song while opening the package to make it look and sound more legendary, thought it was playing in my mind anyway.

Early Impressions

As it goes without saying, this is a huge notebook that you wouldn’t want to be traveling with. As hard as I try to not compare this one with my recently restored M1210, there are a few commonalities that cannot be ignored. We see the same set of seven multimedia keys, a MediaDirect button, and several other similar design elements. Unlike on the M1210 though, here the media buttons don’t feel like they’re in the way, as the palmrest is massive! There’s also a sub-woofer which reminds me of my Dell Studio, and the speakers are big, and obviously super loud.

Most of the ports are at the back, just as I like it. There are more USB-A ports, which wouldn’t be that difficult to achieve on a machine this size. There’s also this display latch for the massive lid, as apparently Dell wasn’t confident that the hinge would keep it secure while closed. The optical drive tray comes out from the left, which I don’t remember seeing in any other notebook.

We have lights at seven places, not counting the status LEDs and some illuminated keys. Funny enough, even with all these extra aesthetic lights, the keyboard still isn’t backlit.

Even when the machine gets warm from underneath during use, the palmrest still feels relatively cool, again probably due to the cooling space or rather, volume. But even with all that space, there is no webcam!

Whenever I come across machines like these, whether it be a ThinkPad or otherwise, I always imagine how the first owner of these machines may have felt back in the day. I mean if this machine blew me away with its design today, I hope the first owner at least had half as much excitement using it back when they had bought this at full price with their hard-earned money.

Initial State

This machine was sold as running fine with merely 2GBs of RAM, a 100GB mechanical hard drive with a fresh installation of Ubuntu. It took some patience to boot into Ubuntu due to the speed of the mechanical drive. There was a broken F8 key on the keyboard, the Dummy insert for the ExpressCard slot was missing, and the display hinge was a little loose. The battery wasn't in the best health, obviously, but who would use this machine on battery power anyway?

There were also a lot of unexpected goodies included in the sale. It included these two “XPS” branded items and a lot of discs. Two of them were Windows XP re-installation discs, one for drivers and utilities, and a few others that I probably won’t need or use.

Restoration

The machine was in an even better condition than the M1210, with only a couple of minor issues that needed attention.

  1. I started with an obligatory cleanup and thermal repaste, and I expected to learn a lot of interesting things during the process.
    1. Everything was huge and spaced out compared to the other machines I’ve done this on. This gave me a lot of space to work inside, exactly as I expected.
    2. Some of the screws go down a little too deep here, given how thick the chassis is. I was at the limit of how deep my screwdriver could go in order to turn the screws.
    3. There were way more things to disconnect, but I’d still call this one of my easiest disassemblies similar to the ThinkPad W530.
    4. The heatsink could be removed while keeping most of the things in place, of course including the bottom shell pretty much untouched.
    5. There are two CPU fans, one of which was dirtier than the other. Both of them also house the LED lights behind the vents.
    6. Literally, everything I saw inside was very modular in terms of design, as if this machine was designed to be more maintainable than the other Dell models. As a side note, I also found a lot more spare parts for this Dell XPS than I could for others on eBay.
    7. We have three chips that need thermal conduction out of which there’s this integrated GPU that only works with the cooling pad, and the two that need a thermal paste are the Nvidia GPU and the CPU. BTW, the GPU gets a lot of special treatment here, even more so than the CPU, and is secured with these eight screws.
    8. Given that I could complete the thermal repasting without needing to take every single thing apart, I cheated by only doing what was absolutely needed, and that mostly involved removing the dust I could reach, and deep cleaning the two fans, which definitely needed it.
    9. BTW, I still do not know what this thing is here for and what it is supposed to connect to.
  2. Then I took care of replacing the hinge as I could not find a way to tighten them, and thankfully the replacement wasn’t hard to perform either.
  3. The replacement keyboard I ordered was really dirty, to the point that the color of the keys didn’t match the one I had on the machine. But, it was fully functional, and so was the one that came with the machine, so I decided to order a single replacement key instead. But when the spare key arrived, I realized that it appeared to sit a little lower than the rest of the keys. I finally went ahead and spent a lot of time deep cleaning the replacement keyboard, and that’s what I finally used on the machine.
  4. I upgraded the RAM from 2GBs to 4GBs which is the max for this Dell as well, just like the M1210, but thankfully both of the modules are easily accessible behind this service panel below the machine.
  5. I’ll talk about the storage drive upgrade when I cover the operating system installation, as there’s definitely going to be a lot to cover there.
  6. I skipped the WiFi and Bluetooth upgrade for this machine for a reason similar to that of the XPS M1210, which is the lack of custom BIOS with hardware whitelisting removed, and my limited experience working with Dell notebooks.
  7. And yes, as I mentioned before, I wasn’t too concerned about running this machine on battery power, so I skipped getting a replacement battery as well. I may do that sometime in the future if needed.
  8. I also added this dummy ExpressCard insert, for which I had to create an account at Parts-People.com as I could not find one on eBay.

That’s pretty much all the restoration I’ll cover in this video. This notebook is special with a few proprietary elements from Dell, so for the software setup, I plan to cover that in a dedicated video.

The Lights

I do not know about you, but the main attraction of this machine for me is these lights. Apart from being able to work with these through the operating system, the BIOS lets you do a lot with these too, and that’s infact the easiest way to configure them. The lights are divided into four groups:

  1. The pair in the front, right below the palmrest
  2. The pair on the two opposite sides behind the air vents
  3. The pair on the lid
  4. The XPS text on the trackpad

The first three pairs can also change colors, and there are sixteen choices actually, and it is also possible to change different colors for different pairs of lights. The last one though just stays red. So unfortunately, even if I could switch out the angry red to a cool blue at the other places, the trackpad would still stay red, and that somehow goes along well with this text.

Conclusion

The last Dell I reviewed became my oldest notebook yet, and this one being from the same year, becomes the largest portable computer I’ve tried, at least in full working condition. Oops! That was a spoiler. Technically, I also owned a ThinkPad P73 for a day, but as I had to return it the next day, I doubt it would even count.

Coming Up

I have not configured the machine with any operating system yet, and then we also have to put it next to a few machines and have some fun comparing them. I plan to cover all that fun stuff in the next couple of videos.

Outro

That's all I have for this video, and thanks for watching it to the end. May the maker watch over you. See you in the next video! And yes, "Free Palestine!".