Inspiron 15R 5520

Hi - first post and would greatly appreciate some advice!

So I have ordered a Inspiron 15R - 5521 from the UK Dell Outlet, the purpose of which is mainly for photo editing, general web and office use. The full spec is below and it cost £450, from what I can tell a similar specced new machine would be in the £700 - 800 range so hopefully I have got an 'ok' deal.

Firstly, what are your opinions on this laptop, have I got a good laptop for my money (I do have 15 days to return it)?

Secondly Is it possible to install an SSD and use it as the main bootable drive? If so, does anyone have a guide on how to do this? I have searched but to be honest, I haven't found any relevant results.

My thoughts were to move the 1TB drive into a caddy in the DVD bay (and use the DVD drive in an external enclosure) and then put the SSD in the spot where the old hard drive was. Or can I put the SSD in the DVD drive and still use it as the bootable drive? Am I on the right track and has anyone got any experience of doing something similar?

Whilst I am here, does anyone have a recomendation for a good/cheap SSD drive? Its purpose will be to house Windows, Lightroom and Photoshop. Budget ideally is no more than £60, so I am not expected loads of storage, just enough to keep windows and the previously mentioned programs happy!

Thanks for any advice offered, its greatly appreciated!

Base Inspiron 15R - 5521
Processor Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-3517U (1.9GHz, 4M Cache) with 2 GB AMD HD 8730M Graphics
Memory 8 GB Dual Channel DDR3 1600MHz Memory (2 DIMMs)
Hard Disk Drive 1 TB SATA Hard Drive (5400 RPM)
Media Bay 8X DVD+/- RW Drive
NoteBook Screen Display : 15.6in Full High Definition (1920X1080) AntiGlare WLED LCD Panel

 

Decent price for the config for sure.

I would consider upgrading to 16 GB and a SSD drive to improve your editing speeds.

 

Thanks

Do you know how I would go about installing an SSD and keeping the existing 1TB drive?

 

Since DVD uses standard Sata connector i dont see why your 1tb drive wouldnt work inside of Caddy.

 

Thanks, so presumably I can put the SSD in the existing hard drives space and boot from that without there being any issues?

Does anyone have a guide to doing this?

 

Search eBay for optical bay hard drive caddy

I am not sure if the 5520 have any out yet, but failing that u can always use an external drive either USB 3 or eSata.

 

Can u try to overclock the 8730M to see how high this puppy can go ? That would be great. Thx.