What to do once you receive an m17x R3?

I was just delivered an m17x r3 a few hours ago, but just got around to turning it on. I know we are suppposed to update the drivers and windows itself but I have a few questions.

What order? Drivers first and then windows, or vice versa?

The driver for the GTX 580m says urgent under it, but how do I know what vbios I have? (Bios is different from vbios right?) I don't want to assume it is up to date and I do not want to flash the bios if it is already up to date.

Also my service tag or product are not it my Dell Account. I tried adding it in but nothing comes up; it just refreshes to the "Add Product" page. I probably have to call support about that.

Thank you.

 

you just got a new computer? Install a game and start playing. Enjoy the crap out of it

 

I would do fresh installation of Windows, but don't install any programs or drivers. Let Microsoft completely update the installation through Windows Update. Once that's done, create a system image with Windows, and then store that image somewhere else...a USB HDD, etc.

Then compile a collection of all of the drivers you will need for a full installation, and keep them with the system image you've made. This will speed things up even more.

If you have this fresh image with all current updates, you can easily restore it if something goes haywire. And then you've only got to wait for updates to install that came out after your restore point. Take this from someone who had reformatted from the painfully slow disk many, many times.

That is a very nice laptop, and you will enjoy it.

 

I backed up the factory state of the HDD using Acronis before booting into Windows for the first time. Then I installed my own copy of Windows, installed all the drivers, then ran a benchmark using 3DMark 11 then put on some games to see how far I could put up the graphics settings.