I think I got the smaller but faster Vostro 1510 in 2008. I know I sprang for the shock-resistant HDD option after the miserable experience of hard drive failure and expensive data recovery. Eventually I retired from FFXI. Then the Inspiron's display hardware flaked out again so that the whole right side of the display was corrupted. That's when I determined that FFXI was pretty much unplayable on the Vostro's lower-spec GPU.
So while I was revitalizing my backup plan on the Vostro, I got to thinking: wouldn't it be handy to have the Inspiron ready as an emergency machine, if the Vostro really suddenly died? So I connected the nicer of my spare external LCD monitors, and voilĂ , it worked.
Then it needed a shedload of Windows updates after being dormant for, I don't even know, probably as much as 1.5 years. Following the updates and obligatory reboot, the external display wasn't getting signal. I blamed Windows update; I'd un-hidden an update I'd evidently hidden for some forgotten reason, so at that point I assumed the one update had boned my external display. And this jogged my memory and I vaguely remembered wrestling with such an issue before. So I rolled back to the pre-update system restore point, but that didn't fix my issue. Now I wouldn't swear that this admittedly vague memory was pertinent to the Inspiron after all.
The 8.3.17 version of "Dell QuickSet" on the Vostro includes a settings page to choose display options and even rotate the display. The 3.9.4 version on the Inspiron has no such controls; it's limited to power-management option profiling, i.e. redundant next to XP's own PM controls. There is no later version download for the Inspiron on Dell's support site. I balked at installing an off-product version of QuickSet.
Turns out that simply toggling the keyboard CRT/LCD function (Fn+F8) cycles through integral/external display possibilities. The system just doesn't predictably retain that selection across reboots. Meanwhile I've also opened it up to both an aftermarket remote control tool and Windows RDP, so I can do things to it without having to physically move the external monitor connector from machine to machine.