Solved! Is this Alienware 15 quote good?

mattamomo

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I use to think Alienware was massively overpriced. But just got off contacting the support with the following quote:

i7 7820HK
128GB m.2 sata
1TB 7200rpm HDD
Gtx 1070 8gb
Office personal
8gb ram
120 Hz G Sync screen
99w 6 cell battery
A year damage protection

All for £1500

As far as I have seen, I don't even think some of the budget options are even priced as fairly as that are they?
Considering the robust aluminium chassis and build quality is that a good deal, or am I missing something?
 
Solution
Most SSD vendors offer a migration/cloning tool. Once they are connected you boot as normal, run the utility, it copies over everything, then you take the old drive out and see if it boots. If it does, plug the other drive back in (make sure it doesn't boot from it) then wipe it for re-use.

grimfox

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I think it's a little high, but for a gaming laptop alienware has one of the better values. I think it's a bit overpriced compared to when I bought mine. I spent about the same on a 17" but that was 6+ years ago.

edit:
I looked at the US site. Dell has changed Alienware quite a bit. You can't get that CPU for the price you are paying in the US. It cost 100USD more. But the US version has more ram. It's probably an acceptable tradeoff. For the price I'd like to see a bigger SSD but dell has always been stingy with SSDs in their laptops.
 

Jamie_69

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I'd say it's probably about standard for what's in it. Basically it's probably £200 cheaper as it has half the ssd capacity and half the RAM you would normally find in a 1070 laptop
 

Eximo

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m.2 Sata is a little sad in such a nice system. Find out if it supports NMVe. You can always swap the SSD for a larger one and add RAM. Or displace the 1TB drive with a 2.5" SATA SSD of your choice. That will improve battery life a lot actually.
 

mattamomo

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I know that an NVMe upgrade is available through them. And I believe there are 2 or 3 m.2 slots. One is occupied by the stated 128GB sata SSD.
I'm not sure if all 3 support NVMe however. I guess if they don't I could just get an NVMe and switch the sata one to the other m.2 slot?

Is there a way to switch the OS from the Sata to the NVMe on the same laptop?
 

Eximo

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Most SSD vendors offer a migration/cloning tool. Once they are connected you boot as normal, run the utility, it copies over everything, then you take the old drive out and see if it boots. If it does, plug the other drive back in (make sure it doesn't boot from it) then wipe it for re-use.
 
Solution

mattamomo

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If that is the case, I could probably ask for the 128gb SSD included to be taken off the quote, and just buy a bigger 250GB NVMe Samsung drive, and migrate the OS from the HDD to the m.2 SSD? Or is migration only from SSD to SSD

The drive would cost around £110, and it would knock around £100 off the quote by removing the SSD they put in I'd imagine.

So I would be looking at £1400 for the above laptop without the SSD. £110 for this SSD
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/250gb-samsung-960-evo-3d-v-nand-m2-pcie-gen-30-x4-nvme-11-3200mb-s-read-1500mb-s-write-330k-300k-iop?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIkYng9-OR2gIVzbXtCh2JXQ4tEAQYASABEgLqOvD_BwE

And then £80 for this ram
http://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/alienware-15-r3/CT9462416

That would give it 250gb NVMe SSD, 1tb HDD and 16GB for £1590.

Would that be a decent price for those specs
 

grimfox

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That's an excellent idea. But make sure your SSD is at least half the size of the HDD or you'll run into issues with the image size because of the way the HDD stores the page file and some other critical items on the physical disk. I ran into this issue on my A'ware when I added a 250gb SSD. I couldn't decrease the image size below ~350 gb and therefore couldn't clone the drive like I wanted. I eventually had to do a fresh install. It was a PITA.

I also had some issues with dell support because my phone number screwed up their system for some reason and they never honored any warranty issues. There support is normally good but for that one product I bought under that phone number I got screwed.
 

Eximo

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Migration can be done from any drive. Most tools will re-size the partition to the destination based on available space. Only if you actually have more data then the destination drive is a problem, and most tools will let you exclude files and folders.

Samsung's partition magic is pretty good. I've used Acronis True-Image and Macrium Reflect as well with no issues.

The OEM supplied tools only work when the destination is the bundled drive though.
 

grimfox

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Eximo is mostly right. But there are some instances, like mine, where it wont work. I only had about 90gb of actual data on my drive. I scrapped just about everything on my drive and still couldn't shrink the partition below 350gb on a 750gb drive. That was 5-6 years ago so maybe it's even less likely now. My point is better to do it sooner rather than after you have a bunch of files on your drive to where it hurts to do a fresh install.
 

Eximo

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That is curious, you might have had some reserved space, though that would be an awful lot for hiberfil.sys and the swap. Probably would have used a third party tool at that point.

Last time I used Samsung's it had a simple slider. It didn't do anything to the source drive, just made those changes to the clone. Also works when going the other way, from a smaller drive to a larger one as I recall.
 

mattamomo

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So I should be ok with that Samsung EVO drive at 250gb?

The laptop would come with Windows, Office and a video+photo editor combo (powerdirector 16, photodirector 9) installed plus any bloatware, driver software etc.

Would I be able to copy everything over exactly as it is?
Because if that is possible it makes things a lot easier, but your comment about OEM tools suggests that won't be the case? @Eximo
 

mattamomo

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So looking into it, from the limited videos I can find, it looks like the Samsung Migration tool literally copies everything from the source drive onto a destination drive that is their SSD.
I was a bit confused about partions mentioned in other software options but the Samsung software doesn't seem to require anything like that, is that correct to assume?

And once the migration is complete, what's the best way to make sure the SSD is the new boot drive. The Samsung software deletes the files on the old HDD.
 

Eximo

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1) Yes
2) I'm not sure what you mean, drive cloning will take everything, including partitions. The only potential issue is the source being larger than the destination. Some tools require the partition to be shrunk prior to copying so that it fits on the destination drive.
3) The BIOS will need to used to set the primary boot drive. Though on your first attempt, just make sure the new drive is the only drive.