Dell Inspiron 530 - Back to Home

Many years ago, probably in 2017, I got a Dell Insprion 530 from a family member who was throwing it out. I used it heavily for quite a long time, mostly for old software testing, but as I got more computers over time, it saw less use. Eventually, in (I think) early 2020, I gutted the machine for parts. A good portion of the parts got trashed, but I kept some stuff, most importantly the motherboard. Because I got bored, I reassembled what's left of the 530 for it's first boot in over 2 years.

The temporary setup with the Inspiron 530 motherboard.

Here's the setup. The power supply is a 300W ACBel, and the CPU is a Core 2 Duo E6550 @ 2.33GHz. I'm not sure how I ended up with that PSU in my collection, my best guess is that I got it from some dumpster haul years ago.

The RAM was supposed to be this generic 512MB DDR2 stick I found in my bag of loose RAM; that stick didn't function, though, so I stole a 2GB one from the Inspiron 537. I can't remember if I kept the original sticks from the 530 or not; if I remember correctly, the original configuration was 4x1GB sticks.

One other issue is that the original CPU cooler went missing at some point, even though images show it was installed on the board as recently as 10 months ago. I don't have a spare LGA 775 cooler on hand, and I didn't want to spend the time to steal one from a different machine, so I just ran it without a cooler. Usually that's not a very smart idea, but I think it can run for 20 seconds just to get to the BIOS.

The power button I stole from the Inspiron 537.

Last step was finding a power button, which just like the RAM, I stole from the 537.

After assembling all the components, I finally got it to boot. There's nothing to see besides the splash screen & BIOS, since I wasn't going to throw in an HDD and install something when the CPU still has no cooling. Here's my YouTube video of it booting.

I might try & rebuild it "for real" at some point instead of stealing most of the parts from the 537, but that's a project for another day. Until then, the Inspiron 530 motherboard will return to sitting under the workbench with the rest of my random computer parts.