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Remember, doing it yourself doesn’t always mean you’re making something look nicer. Sometimes you turn a perfectly good Honda motorcycle into a recumbent spearmint pod. It’s worth it, though, when that pod gets 214mpg going 55mph.

Allert Jacobs designed and built this contraption from a Honda Innova motorcycle. In its previous incarnation, the bike weighed 231 pounds and got a still respectable—but not mind-blowing—114mpg.

By giving it an aerodynamic shell (that splits in half for easy entry), Jacobs has undoubtedly made his hog a much more efficient vehicle in all aspects, aside picking up ladies or applying to the Hell’s Angels.

Dell recently issued a BIOS fix for its Studio 17 with Core i7, designed to solve a serious crashing issue. However, after the release of Intel’s new Core i5 processor and a number of vocal user complaints about its Core i7 product, the company has made the lower-powered and priced Core i5 the Studio 17’s default CPU choice. Though, as of this posting, we did not see a Core i7 option on Dell.com, a rep assured us that the Core i7 model, labeled the Dell Studio 1747 has not been discontinued and will return to the site within days.

When we reviewed the Dell Studio 17 with Intel’s Core i7 processor (aka Dell Studio 1747) in November, we gave the notebook a 4-star rating due to its blazing performance and relatively affordable price. However, we noted two major problems we experienced with our review unit. First, the initial system we received stopped booting (and made several beeping noises) just after testing had been completed and, second, we noticed that the exterior of the chassis got hot, with the underside of the system registering a troubling 112-degrees Fahrenheit after just 15 minutes of playing a Hulu video.

We returned the first unit to Dell, which repaired it and sent it back to us a couple of days later, saying that the first issue we encountered was an isolated incident. The repaired unit worked, but we did experience experience a couple of mysterious blue screen crashes the first time we tried to play Hulu videos on it, though these seemed to disappear on subsequent tests. After we informed Dell about the uncomfortably hot temperatures, they sent us a second review unit to test. This second unit  did not break or crash, but was just as hot as the original.

Readers Respond

Without having tested an entire assembly line of Dell Studio 17s with Core i7, it was impossible for us to tell if the one defective review unit we received was a fluke or a harbinger of trouble. However, after the product began shipping, we began receiving negative reports from many users, claiming that their Dell Studio 1747s (with Core i7) had died after a few days or hours of use.

A number of users also posted on forums that their Dell Studio 1747s slowed down after intense use. For example, a French-speaking user posted this experiment, which claims that after running two CPU-intensive programs, Prime 95 and Furmark, the CPU speed dropped from 1.6 to 1.06-GHz. Notebookcheck.com, a professional review site, did not see a clock speed drop but did see their test notebook’s 3DMark06 scores drop significantly after 12 hours of intense use. We did not test our review unit for performance throttling before we had to return it to Dell.

Dell’s BIOS Update

Recently, Dell  issued a BIOS update that fixes what they call the “7 beeps problem,” the same issue that bricked our first review unit. Dell advises that, if you own a Dell Studio 1747 that is working properly, you should install the BIOS update to insure you never get the 7 beeps problem. If your Dell Studio 1747 has already stopped booting, you can call Dell support or try re-seating the CMOS battery to bring the system back to life.

Whether the new BIOS update (termed the A04 BIOS) makes the system cooler or resolves its alleged performance issues remains to be seen. If you have a Dell Studio 1747, please let us know if the BIOS update has improved your system by posting in the comments below.

Own another Dell notebook or netbook? Sound off here on what you think of the brand.

Oppo has begun its week by launching the lowest-cost Blu-ray player in what’s normally a high-end line. The BDP-80 is similar to the BDP-83 but drops the secondary video processor, moving all work to the main decoder; it sheds 24p DVD upscaling in the process. Slightly older DACs as well as the absences of IR and RS-232 (serial) ports also help separate the BDP-80 from its earlier but more expensive predecessor.

The player is still fully capable of all modern Blu-ray features and carries both an Ethernet jack and 1GB of internal memory to support BD-Live. It can still play Blu-ray movies at 24p without pull-down conversion and carries an HDMI 1.3 output with support for 36-bit color on matching TV sets and receivers. Non-disc formats are still an option and range from simple audio and photos to video formats like AVCHD (H.264), whether it’s stored on a disc or on an attached USB drive.

Oppo is already taking orders for the BDP-80 and puts it at a comparatively low $289 versus a much higher $499 for the older BDP-83.

The Dell Inspiron 11z is a thin and light laptop with an 11.6 inch display. It’s a bit larger than Dell’s Inspiron Mini netbook line, and it comes with an Intel CULV processor, which provides more power than the Atom chips found in Dell’s netbooks. But the Inspiron 11z is still portable, cheap, and a little slow compared with many of the company’s larger laptops.

The laptop comes with a variety of configuration options. Dell sent me a review unit with a 1.3GHz dual core Intel Pentium SU4100 processor, Windows 7 Home Premium, a 250GB hard drive, 2GB of RAM, and a 6 cell battery. This configuration sells for $544 (or actually, $584, since this model has a $40 jade green lid), but the base model is available for just $379.

Of course, to get the lower price, you’ll have to settle for a 3 cell battery, single core processor, smaller hard drive, and Windows Vista.