Help Me Upgrade My Vanilla Beater!?

Well, there are tons of knowledgeable people on this forum that have dedicated a lot of time into there m15x's and I was hoping a few kind gentlemen could spread this wonderful wealth of knowledge unto me. So I've done lots of digging around and seen plenty of separate posts with many available parts witch intrigues me as I have always been told my laptops biggest pitfall was its inability to upgrade. Well here I am witnessing a handful of people swapping parts left and right and making what seem to be some amazing builds! What I am hoping to accomplish is to get some sound advice as to what I should do with my stock early 2011 m15x with nothing but a little 460m and Q740 at 1.73GHz, obviously need to upgrade those parts but I also wonder about ram, the possibility of SSD's, ect. Now I'm not looking to spend 2 grand and run ultra on all the latest games, Ive got a custom built desktop for that. Hell, I would be happy getting away with a steady "medium" graphics somewhere around or above 50fps. As of now, this laptop is nothing but an old beat up mechanics special that has been collecting dust and I would love to give it the good ol' revamp it deserves. The main thing is that I want to do this right. The hard drive died a few months back and did a half assed windows install and have been experiencing issues ever since (mostly driver issues, also command center simply doesn't work and i'm locked to a solid purple keyboard.). This time, I want to buy all the pieces parts, format the hard drive, and spend a full weekend just doing everything by the books (following driver install orders, reading into what I should do differently now that 4 years have passed, ect.). Thanks in advance for any replies, anxious to get started.

Edit: I forgot to add that my battery is completely dead and my power supply is not stock and slightly undervolted, no power cord= no laptop. Also my optical drive seems to only work when it wants to, I saw a comment on a similar upgrade thread that recommended replacing the optical drive with a SSD and using an external blueray player, seemed like something I will be adding to the list of things to do.

CURRENT SPECS (basically stock)
-CPU: I7 740qm
-GPU: 460m
-HDD: replaced stock 250 with 500 gb HDD do to massive failure
-RAM: stock 6GB DDR3
-CD DRIVE: Dieing (can possibly swap out for SSD?)
-POWER: Dead battery + Under-volting brick (saw something about a 9 volt that raises the stance of the computer, interested in more info)

 

To run the upgrades you'll need a good PSU. Try a 240W adapter.

CPU- You can get 920/940XM
HDD: Any 2.5 inches SSD
RAM: 8GB.
CD Drive: Replacing it for SSD wouldn't be as good as replacing your current HDD with SSD and putting your HDD in there. However, this will require several mods. This is because the port on the ODD is SATA I, therefore the speed is lower than the standard HDD port (SATA II).

 

Well, that takes care of most everything. But what about GPU? The CPU varies a lot online in price as well, Do I have to grab a specific card or how do I determine that?

 

Easiest card is the AMD 7970M if found at the right price. Don't pay over $200 really because its old tech nowadays.
This card is plug and play but its more stable if undervolted. Nvidia cards require driver inf. file tweaks which can be a bit of extra effort.

Might I also suggest a clean install on your SSD. I cloned my original HDD including the recovery partition and this has caused me no end of problems. Make a backup of the recovery partition but be sure to remove it and definitely make sure you install windows on an SSD with no partitions!

 

I'd go with what Alienware-L said above (I recently upgraded my vanilla that I got for free from a friend just like that). Get the 920xm as you'll save money and it'll pretty much do the same thing with ThrottleStop clocking in at ~3.1ghz. Clean your fans and heatsink; reinstall cpu/gpu with IC Diamond. Make sure you get the 240w power supply and a SSD caddy will still be better than your DVD drive unless you use CD/DVDs still.

As for GPU, I'd pay a little extra and get the 970m over the 7970m unless you're really strapped for cash. 7970m is easier to install and whatnot since you won't have to modify any Nvidia drivers, but I think it's a better value/performance & runs cooler than AMD.

Really happy with the laptop now. I got my 7970m for free off of a m18x that I had a while back so... that's the only reason I'm running it at the moment. Waiting to see what the next generation GPU brings to the table before I upgrade