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    Inspiron 17R 7720 Questions - config, utilities, and more

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by zakman14, Nov 19, 2012.

  1. zakman14

    zakman14 Newbie

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    I am the proud owner of a 7720, and for the most part am enjoying having a brand new computer to play with (the older one was a 7-year old Inspiron 9300 - definitely time for an upgrade!)

    However, I've got a few questions about it that I hope can be answered here. I have looked through the monster thread for the 7720, but I didn't spot the answers to my questions in there (could have missed them though).

    1. I bought it with the 1TB 5400RPM drive, and while I'm happy with the performance so far, I've noticed that the sucker runs really, really warm, especially when gaming. Since it's right where I rest my hand on that side of the keyboard, it gets uncomfortable after a while. Is there any way to get the drive to run a little cooler? I have a laptop cooler, but the fans on that are placed where they'd cool the middle of the laptop, not the spot where the drive is placed. Recommendations on a good one for this model would be helpful.

    Also, would it help if I moved the drive to the secondary bay, or would that overheat my CPU? Drive would be right under it.

    2. When I bought the laptop, I did a clean install to get rid of all the bloatware. Reinstalled, everything is working ok. However, I'm not sure if I have the SSD drive set up correctly. I ordered it with the 32GB mSATA card, and right now the RST application shows it as using 8GB for data and 22GB for cache. Is this optimal, or should I reconfigure it to get the best bang for my buck?

    3. What temp monitoring and setting tweaking utilities would you all recommend? I use RivaTuner on my desktop, but it doesn't support mobile chipsets. I don't plan on doing much (if any) overclocking, but I would like the ability to monitor temps and see if I can kick the fans up a notch or two.

    Thanks!
     
    zakman14, Nov 19, 2012
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  2. KSMB

    KSMB Notebook Deity

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    1..very very strange........i have 2 x 7200rpm (and i have very low on that side on the laptop)....if its really gets so warm as you mention, i would call DELL and see if they might can replace that harddrive.........7720 is one of my coolest (coolest in lowest temp) laptop.

    2. its exact right (the msata works divided).........a image of my msata conf:
    [​IMG]

    3. there is plenty of free temp software's...i use HWMonitor...very good:
    Download HWMonitor 1.21.0 Free - A hardware monitoring software that will read the system's main health sensors - Softpedia
     
    KSMB, Nov 20, 2012
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