XPS 15z (sandy bridge) enhanced w/ Windows 8 PR (Metro UI enabled) and 16gb mem

Just upgraded this Dell XPS 15z (Sandy Bridge) with 16 GB memory and 512 GB SSD. This being my first system running on SSD, have to say it's pretty faaaaaast. Overall I'm pretty happy with the unit, especially now that I've added two additional goodies. Yeah, start up and shutdown is really cool now.... LOL.

In addition, I'm running on Windows 8 Release Preview to boot... still trying to get used to it. Earlier I wasn't able to install all Dell drivers on here... and caused it to hang on one of the nvidia drivers I downloaded from Dell's website (but could have been a combination of other drivers I was trying to install). Some drivers are for the mechanical hard drives, so be weary what you try to install.

Recovery from the failure (it stalled with flickering background right before login prompt... but you never get to see the login prompt) was pretty painless. Had option to restore completely from factory settings, restore from prior to software install settings (forget what exactly the term displayed but this allowed you to keep your personal files, it just uninstalls all your apps that you initially/previously installed while "refreshing" your PC to almost back to factory settings) so you can keep your documents, personal files, etc.

Will try to stick to it from now on, but if it becomes to where I run into too many pre-GA issues then I may have to revert back to Win7 for the time being. Still venturing around Windows 8 but nothing keeping me from doing what I used to do in Win7, almost everything works (sound, wireless, camera, BT is seen but I haven't tried connecting).... so far just trying to find ways to customize Win 8. Hope I don't run into major problems with VMWare Workstation 8. Some commandline commands seem to be missing (i.e. system information).

Haven't gamed on here... yet, maybe later but not that interested gaming on this weak laptop graphics chipset.

Not sure where the SSD hard drive performance stands globally (from Google screenshots, mine is slow compared to many out there) but either way it's still faster than any 7200 RPM drives (and 10K RPM drives) that I've experienced.


This is my laptop's performance:


Lastly, I allowed this system to run for several hours and I didn't really see a dramatic increase in battery life... granted I did reboot, plug in, remove, inserted DVDs to install, etc... but I was hoping it would also improve on battery life. I'll try to test (and tweak) this further at the coffee house.