*OFFICIAL* Alienware 13 R1/R2 Owner's Lounge

Try trying off express charge in your bios

 

Good afternoon anyone who owns one of these still!

I just picked one up locally, got a very fair deal imo
i5 haswell sadly, 16gb, 512gb M.2 SSD, 860m, QHD 1440p touchscreen, all clean

Chassis is in prime condition, seems it was used on a tabletop all of it's life and not EDC. even the screen looks like it was hardly ever touched.

I can tell the person wasn't really much into computers. The bios was still on A00, the AlienFX was on 4.0.0 (Installing Alienware CC updated it to 13.x.x), all screws looked like they were never even undone before (usually black screws show some scraping on them when they've been unscrewed once).

I took it apart, re-did paste with kryonaut and put on new pads, and wow the temps are ridiculous low. I did not even undervolt the CPU and it maxes out low 60s during Firestrike (I know, GPU based benchmark), but the GPU capped out at 63c as well.

So I got a few questions for owners:
-Worth updating to R2 battery? Saw a few posts saying it fits and works fine, but most recent post said something about the windows charging deal always saying 4 mins

-Can I use both M.2 SSD slots? Is it Sata M.2 only? I assume no PCIe or NVMe can be used on this due to age.

-Are any of the AW13 boards direct swap? Such as R2/R3? If one day the board dies, am I stuck with using only the haswell/860m, and maybe the broadwell/860m boards?

Not sure if anyone tried swapping, but thought I'd ask. There's a crapton of posts, only went through so many.

 

How difficult was it to get the 62 wHr battery from Dell? My 13 R1 battery has about 130 charge cycles and battery life is about 2-3 hours with 40-60% brightness. Not terrible, but seriously contemplating on replacing the battery if it isn't too difficult. I took my previous laptop (HP Envy 17) apart to replace the TIM on the CPU and GPU. I assume the Alienware 13 R1 isn't too terrible in taking apart to replace the battery.