Just a heads up, I had two laptops replaced already for burnt out motherboards (would not charge the battery, but would run off a charged battery). I had to call Dell like 4 times to get it done, but they replaced both, and I'm going to use one in my car. I threw away 2 before I heard about this, after cannabalizing them for parts. A company we work with has a couple of these.

More info,

http://www.lieffcabraser.com/dell-inspiron.htm

You can often find these inspirons, and their motherboards, broken on eBay, for similar reasons. Eventually something fails due to heat or what not, which is why I'm going to run it at 1.6ghz locked, and slightly underclock the video card (geforce go 5200). One of the chips that fail is under the video card.

To run it at a half speedstep speed, disable speedstep in bios, then configure a program called SpeedswitchXP to run it at full speed, which is limited to 1.6ghz (google it). Normally, they range from 2.6 to 3.06, and supposedly can accept hyperthreading CPU's.

There seem to be no readily available 135-140w DC-DC adapters for this laptop, and it uses a special sense circuit to check if a genuine adapter is used, via the center pin. The positive is on the inside of the power barrel, while negative is the ground. There is an option in the later bioses to disable the charger check, but I don't have another charger to test it with, to see if it still works, maybe with a warning.

It runs roadrunner, with the latest flash skins, very very well, and has the ability to do rudimentary DX9 for future skins/programs if they surface.