first laptop questions

Hello everyone, I'm a first time poster but I've read many posts by you guys. I ordered a dell xps m1530 because I'll be transferring colleges (to Texas Tech) and I will soon be living in a dorm on campus. I wanted a "portable" gaming laptop so I won’t be chained to my dorm the whole time. Anyways my questions are as follows...

1. What are some good programs that I might consider installing on my laptop when I first get it? Do dell notebooks ship with a lot of bloatware for instance? and is there any safe way of removing that stuff?

I plan to install open office, ccleaner, and avira anti virus. Are there any free programs that are good for notebooks and/or fresh computers that I am forgetting?

2. When would be a good time to upgrade the ram from 2 gigs to 4? Will doing this void the warranty? I would hate to upgrade to 4 gigs only to find something wrong with the processor or monitor and have dell feed me to the wolves for voiding their warranty.

3. wayyy down the road what are my other upgrade possibilities? or am I stuck with the processor, graphics card and hard drive I ordered?

 

Dell notebooks ship with a ton of crap ware. Youre best bet is formatting it and installing only the programs you need.

SInce you were smart and bought a Dell, download a copy of I8KFANGUI. This program will allow you to monitor and change the speeds of your fans in order to cut the temperatures. It is better to have your fans at full time all of the time because a cool running laptop will last much longer than one which gets hot.

You most likely would not notice any difference from going to 4gb from 2gb of memory. Upgrading ram on a laptop does not void the warranty. It is part of the Magnus Mendelson act.

You can upgrade your processor in the long run, but that involves you buying a processor which will work, and you will have to take the entire system apart to upgrade your processor. You most likely cannot upgrade your graphics card. Id say only .5% of the notebooks on the market can upgrade graphics cards, and those are the clevo D900 and M570 series notebooks.

K-TRON

 

^^^^ What he said. I don't think you should think or worry about upgrading the CPU or GPU as both will be 1st, expensive and 2nd not possible. Enjoy it and in a couple of years get a new one.

 

thanks guys!

 

If you're you're buying that 1530 with a mechanical harddrive, an SSD will probably be a good upgrade sometime down the line. They're only going to get cheaper and faster as time goes on.

 

Porn related software? Guitar hero 3 is also really fun.

Yes. Like K-TRON said, reformatting is the easiest option. But if you don't have experience with calling microsoft or finding/downloading/installing tons of drivers, then uninstalling is your best option. I only had to uninstall 5 or 6 bloatware from my HP.

Tons, but only install what you need.

Never and nope

Hard drive you could upgrade but it'll void the warranty. You can also upgrade CPUs within this generation, but I don't see why you would.