M6600 Owners Thread

There seems to be another issue if cloning you HDD to an SSD or msata. It is partition alignment.
Has anyone experienced this or is there an alignment tool?

 

Will the M6600 take a pci-express memory card?

 

As long it is in the mSATA format. I think it will possibly work.

 

Any folks in here managed to successfully reduce the size of the winsxs folder in Windows 7 Pro SP1 as it is pretty bloated?
Is there a util?

 

Yep I have spent the afternoon preparing my drive for the ssd. I have got it down to 65GB with the including the programs & OS. Just to recap rather than clone the HDD to SSD you are saying do a backup and then recover it to the SSD. To do this I assume I will have to make a bootable USB key or will it still boot from the Acronis Boot loader F11 key when I start, then just load the recovery image from the E:drive (1TB backup secondary drive) leaving the 512HDD in the current c:drive which of course will become D: after installing the SSD. I will then backup my data on the d:drive and format it to remove the OS and reinstate the data. Then shift my pagefile to the d: from the C:SSD. I will then check the Partition alignment on the SSD and make sure the "TRIM" command is enabled. Does this sound about right to you?

 

This just about "Sums Up" most of the stuff you need to know about SSD. Very useful.

 

Acronis 2012 will align the partitions properly.

Winsxs is full of hard links. Windows Explorer (and other tools not aware of hard links) reports the size way higher than it actually is. Don't worry about it; most of the files in there are pointing to the same data on disk so they are just being counted several times. You can probably Google around to read up on the details.

 

I can add that Windows 7 aligns the install partition, so there may not be a need to align it again with Acronis.

And also, there should be a tiny install version of Windows with all extra functions disabled, I've seen it on google. Try searching for tiny windows, it will give you a link..

 

The original factory applied thermal paste is the best you can get. You wouldn't want to be doing that to a mobile workstation GPU.

Overclocking is only for gaming. It's a gimmick created by AMD to sell differently as they can't compete on reliability against Intel. I know as I used to be in Intel. We don't recommed consumer overclocking. You will get problems and errors when you are doing your work that requires heavy GPU resources such as FX rendering, movie/audio post or pre production, rendering CAD or other related design contents.

Further more if you are into gaming and overclocking, get an Alienware m18x that supports dual gaming-prosumer GTX or ATI GPUs. or an Eurocomp.

You will be paying a premium for a workstation on gaming. Even pro-games don't use Quadro or FirePro. They will opt for Radeon or GTX.

 

pm me if you are still selling your Alienware m18x. Seems like a very new machine to me. Why would you be selling it ?