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    From a mac to an alienware m17xr4 7970m, HDD questions! please help!

    Discussion in 'Alienware 17 and M17x' started by mkerr, Jul 17, 2013.

  1. mkerr

    mkerr Notebook Enthusiast

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    Hi all.

    I've recently managed to grab a dell refurb, with the intent to replace my aging desktop.
    It's a m17xr4
    - two 1tb 5400 HDD
    - 7970m
    - 32gb ram
    which I got for $1600 AUD, not too shabby.

    My experience so far has been pretty average.

    For some reason, it came with a vanilla windows home premium install, with no proper drives on first boot.
    Of course, no manual or anything else to tell me what to expect.
    Having come from a macbook air, I was pretty disapointed (should add that i've built my own PCs for the past 10 years, though am not up to date).
    Did some googling, and realised that the crappy windows install didn't have any of the alienware software etc installed.
    So popped in the windows 7 pro disk that came with and did a fresh reinstall.

    Booted up to find again, none of the appropriate drivers were installed, and nothing worked.
    did more googling, and downloarding of lots and lots of drivers, and have been bashing my head against a wall to get things to work properly

    It seems my battery is stuffed. and isn't recognised at all. i've done more googling, and found that it might be the cable. will be calling dell as soon as able.
    in the meantime, if I have it plugged in, and remove and reinstall the battery, it recognises it and charges it for a few seconds, then goes back to saying plugged in and not charging.
    ahh well

    after seeing how damn slow it is running the OS of a 5400rpm drive, i'm planning on purchasing a new SSD

    i'm quite unfamiliar with my options, it seems some people are using the SSDs as caching drives, and some for installing the OS on.

    With my setup, what would people recommend?

    i've got an old OCZ vertex in my desktop that I suppose I could salvage.

    I was thinking of keeping the crappy 5400 drives as storage, and installing a new SSD to the mSATA or removing the optical drive.

    Any ideas on what would be best?

    Thanks anyone for any help, I just wanna play some games on this beast :D

    Cheers.
     
    mkerr, Jul 17, 2013
    #1
  2. Alienware-L_Porras

    Alienware-L_Porras Company Representative

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    You can put in an mSATA SSD and use it as the boot drive. You need to get the drivers from DELL.com. Just go to support, enter the service tag and download them from there.
     
    Alienware-L_Porras, Jul 17, 2013
    #2