I have an Inspiron 1720 that had a dead motherboard, found a replacement on Ebay and fitted it. Working fine except the new board calls itself a "Mantra 1720" in the BIOS POST display. I can't find any reference to that system type. The BIOS on the board is a version 0.2.8 from 2006 (IIRC - it's not in front of me right now) and trying to update to the latest Inspiron BIOS fails as the updater complains that it's the wrong system type!
It'd be nice to get the system BIOS up to date, Anyone any idea if that's possible?
Interestingly, the Dell support site thinks it's an Inspiron if I enter the service tag shown on the setup screen.