Chosen Solution
I received this laptop in exchange for removing and destroying the original hard drive, as the previous owner didn’t want to try and sell it and knew I know how to pull the drive and dispose of the drive right. However, I checked the BIOS and found a red flag: it has the Quadro motherboard :-(. While I’m still totally okay with using it (even if it doesn’t last very long), how can I quickly tell which GPU mine has without opening it right away? There were no outward clues it’s a Quadro board like power demand differences; I checked it against the GMA950 D630 I used to retrieve data from floppies for someone. You need to check the service tag on a lot of these Dell laptops to know (or know, like if that model was commonly setup with a GPU like the XPS M1330) and at the time I was more worried about getting it back and dealing with the hard drive since I could tinker with the laptop on my time.
At this point I might as well just throw a cheap SSD and a copy of XP on it and see how long it lasts. I don’t think it will, but I can retrieve the SSD.
New info on the GPU; I also did some research on this and the laptop has the A12 BIOS; this reportedly means the repair was done. In addition, this is the GPU info:
CUDA and OpenCL not on and the GPU has a lawsuit on it
