Dell warranty replacement: E1505 --> Studio XPS 16

Well the E1505 was a great laptop, but after 3.75 years it started having problems, dell tried to replace parts multiple times, but some of the parts were bad out of the box, in the end it was like 3.5 months, 5 or 6 in home service calls, couple of dozen phone calls and the laptop was still not quite right. So after getting off the phone with them the last time, they had asked about sending the laptop into their repair depot or if they couldn't repair it the possibility of a replacement system.

However, yesterday in the mail i got a refurbished:
Dell XPS Studio 16 (1645)
i7/8GB ram/Radeon 4670-1GB/320GB hd/DVDRW/WiFi-N/9-cell/1600x900 LCD/WIN7 Ultimate

For comparison my E1505 was:
1.83 GHz dual core/1GB ram/256mb vid/100GB hd/15.4" 1680x1050/WIN XP/Bluetooth

So far from what i have seen it is an awesome computer and a very nice upgrade.
Couple of questions...
- I have a 500GB 7200RPM 16MB cache hard drive i had picked up for the E1505 that i will probably put in, can i use the dell system restore discs to reformat? or if i did a clean install do i need to use an OEM version of WIN7 or could i use the retail packaged version i have?
- I will check the BIOS version
- and I will check which power pack they sent
- Anything else i should watch out for on this model?

Looks like there is a ton of info here i need to check out
Thanks for any thoughts!

 

Dude, ur one lucky guy, gettin a replacement unit for ur old lappie. I think this replacement is only limited to certain country as I haven't hear of cases at my place.

Imagine the people who might be goin out to get laptops with valid warranty just to wait for system replacements.

 

You can use your retail disc or whatever discs came with the dell laptop. You can use the software to do a clean installing, just but from the dell windows 7 restore disc and do advanced instead of upgrade. From there you can delete or add partitions. I personally delete all the dell/oem recovery partitions so I can have the maximum space, but thats just me...Anyway, you don't need your retail package one but you can if you'd like..

 

One week update...I'm liking the XPS 16 alot, it is an awesome upgrade over my old E1505. Ran into some issues trying to reinstall windows on my new drive, seems that i got a bad factory disc, i tried an install from a retail copy of windows but it needs to be OEM for the win7 code to work with it i guess, so i am just waiting for new discs to show up to upgrade to my 500gb hard drive.

Other than that the led screen is great, the sound is the best i have had in a laptop (never had a model over 15" before) and i have REALLY grown to like the glowing keyboard at night

So far i've only done light tasks, now to try out a few things more intensive...

Created a new thread to track the SXPS 1645 and everything to do with it
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=474989