Swapping from 1080P screen to 1440 Touch Screen

Hello, all.

I ordered the 1080 Alienware 13 last week and although I like the screen, I felt I was missing something without the touch screen. I chatted with Dell this morning and they were able to get me the same model with e 144p touch screen shipped overnight for only $50 more with all taxes and everything. Could not pass it up.

I will have some time to do some comparisons of the screens and for most gaming, I will mainly run in 1080P anyway.

My question is... I have spent the last week completely loading up my existing Alienware 13" with Steam, Origin, Wildstar, UPlay, Blizzard games,etc.... To the point of only about 100GB free. Assuming I decide to keep the new 1440P screen, would it be "possible" to simply grab the drive out of the 1080P model and throw it in the 1440P model? That way, I would not need to re-install 850GB of data!

Thanks for your help.

 

I'd love to read/see your comparison. I'm really interested in the difference in battery life between the two.

 

Which department did you speak with? Returns, sales, or customer care?

 

I spoke to Desiree May using the Dell chat function believe it or not

Last week I purchased the 24 hour ship model with the 1080P screen. It was $1249 (with $50 off coupon on the site) + tax + $25 overnight shipping.

I explained that I may be having buyers remorse, especially with Windows 8 and wanted the touch screen.

The 24 hour ship price of the 1440P touch screen model is $1349 (using the same $50 coupon). She brought the price down to $1322.00 and gave me free overnight shipping (saves another $25), so for $50 more, I get the updated touch screen

She also took care of creating all the return labels for the original system. Free return shipping. If interested, I can provide her contact info... Very helpful, especially for an on-line chat!

 

Getting back to the topic at had, I looked at the Disassembly guide, and it looks like all I should "have to do" is pull the hard drive and bracket out of the original one and throw it in the new one.

Can anyone think of any reason this would not work? The computer should be exactly the same minus the screen. I am assuming they are the same drives, the old one will be filled with all my games and the new one will be the stock Windows 8.1.

Will the Windows 8.1 installed in each PC tie itself to the serial number or service tag of the computer?


Here is the disassembly guide I was looking at.

ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals///all-pr...aptops//alienware-13_Service Manual_en-us.pdf

 

Hey MJBarnes,

It should work fine. I actually did exactly the same thing last time with my 2x Alienware 14's. I was too lazy so when I got the better screen 14 i simply switched the hdds.
From memory all I had to do was activate windows 8.1 and it was fine after that. It asked for a key or something from memory.
After that was activated everything was fine.
I'm just thinking that you may need a few more drivers or software from Dell's site to accommodate for the touchscreen functionality.
Other than that you should be good to go.
Worse case scenario if it doesn't work very well you can backup the games and then restore them pretty easily without having to re-download everything again.