How do i install these drives

Hello guys, I just recently bought two 1 TB hybrid drives for my m17x r4 laptop and windows 7. The reason being it that i lost my CDs that came with my alienware and dell started to my off by transferring me everywhere for 3 hours... ( I also wish to put the 2 drives in raid 0)


I dont wish to carry any data from the drives that are on my pc now. So would i just have to open up my laptop and switch out the drives and just install windows 7 when the boot icon is up or is there a step I am missing. Because i tried to use alien respawn an it said it could not find my factory image (and yes i tried reinstalling it) so I wish do just do a clean install because non of the data on my current drives is important.

This might sound like a silly question but is windows 8.1 better for gaming compared to windows 7??

 

Hi there.

For Respawn to work for you you'd need to create an emergency backup from inside the program. Get a largish (8gb is min I think and I used a 16gb) USB stick and tell it to send to USB drive. You can use F12 boot menu to start the machine from USB, the restore program should start.

Not a silly question at all - this is AW and all we really want is the best gaming experience, not some poncy touch screen interface! No advantage in this respect at all. Win 8 lasted around 30 mins on my machine, went OK but I can't be bothered with a new OS interface when it does a big fat zero for gaming (IMO) .

As to the upgrade, what I would do is set up the drives before installing windows. This way windows sees the RAID when it installs and uses the correct disk drivers. To do this you put the new drives in and when the Intel screen with the disk config comes up you hit the key combo (Ctrl-I I think but it's on-screen) to enter the config. Set up the two drives as a single 2tb and then restart, hit F12 on the bios screen to select the boot device and select your win CD.

Install. It should now look like you have one large drive to install to.

Good luck.

 

I believe the consensus is that W7 is easier to use and more stable when it comes to games.

 

I've tried both, benchmarked both, both SSD benchmarks, PassMark, and 3DMark, Windows 7 always gave me better performance. Plus, noone wants no touch screen metro interface running in the background! that's a touch screen OS no matter what others may say about installing a start menu app to never see metro .....fact is....it's always there,,,,like it or not......you wanna access control panel settings? that's another thing I hate about Windows 8. half the options are in the normal control panel we all know and some drunk dude at Microshaft decided ...heh....lets put the other half in the METRO PC Settings just to mess with people's brains! If you wanna change user account settings, personalization, privacy, etc. those are all buried in the PC Settings of Metro rather than your traditional control panel.......

 

Isn't 8.1 better optimised then 7 when it comes to games? From what I've seen, game's seem to be runing better on 8.1...

 

It`s a mix, some games and when I say some it's very few like Battlefield Wimdows 8 is better by a very small margin....

HARDOCP - AMD Radeon R9 290X Comparison - Battlefield 4 Windows 7 vs. 8.1 Performance Review

but take any other benchmark and 7 blows 8 out of the water