Need Help!

Let me start off by saying go easy on me. I have no clue what I am talking about here that is why I am looking for professional help. I do not know anything about laptops so this should be fun for some of out there. I just bought a Alienware M17x R2 for my nephew. Specs are as follows;

Intel i7 1.73 GHZ Processor Quad-Core
640 GB HD
8 GB Ram 1333.0 MHz / PC3-10600
Win 7
DVD-RW slot load
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870

Now the question I have is is there anything I can do to make this laptop better. A friend said I should get a solid state drive for it, so I got a Samsung 128GB SSD to run everything and will use the 640GB HD to store everything. (Hope that is correct.) I just want him to have the best. He is not in the best off family t begin with so I would like for him to have something to be proud of as well as have it last for a long time. So any help on upgrades or any info would be very helpful. Also I bought this for $799.99 is this a good deal? I look forward to any help that you may have for me. Thanks for taking the time to stop and read this post.
JTay

 

I think that price was a tad high, but not over the top. Yes adding a SSD would make the system boot and react faster to normal task. Making the SSD the boot drive and most common used applicaitons if there was room and the mechanical drives for mass storage would be the correct thing to do and make a noticeable difference in speed of normal operation. Other than that make sure you have the latest GPU drivers etc. Not a bad machine, i picked up a AW17r2 with crossfire 5870's for $400 for my daughter and it runs BF3 great.

 

I don't think you got the best deal out there but you definitely got a good deal. SSD to speed up the booting times would be ideal. Everything else seems really good to me.

 

In the right hands you can make it massively powerful, people have put very fast graphics cards in it, it just depends how much time and money you have.