Hi, I bought my Alienware 18, as a birthday present to myself in September of 2013. The local TigerDirect (back when they had stores in Illinois), had ordered it for a customer who backed out on the deal. It had the original I-7 4700MQ, 32gb of RAM and twin 2gb GDDR5 GTX 765 video cards. It had a “deployment date of July 2013.” As laptops go it was huge even for 2013 but the screen was perfect, and it ran photoshop/Blender and the virtual world (Second Life/Opensim that I use almost daily. It ran almost non-stop since the day I bought it. Not a single parts failure and upgraded the software a few times with zero problems.
Yesterday, I decided to upgrade it. I figured I might be able to upgrade the memory, possibly the graphic cards, and replace the single mechanical drive. It had, two drives, one mechanical and one SSD, an MSata, so I thought. I went online ordered a replacement drive and opened her up.
To my surprise, it didn’t have an MSata drive. It had a WD Black SATA mechanical drive and a Samsung Evo SSD stuffed into the one drive bay.
So, here are my questions. 1). Can I go ahead an add the MSata SSD as the boot drive, while keeping the other two drives (replacing the mechanical with another SSD)? 2). Since I almost never used the optical drive can it be replaced with another device - a multi card reader would be most helpful? 3). Is there any way to increase RAM past the 32gb already onboard and have the system recognize it? (I still have the original BIOS.) 4). Can the optical drive be replaced to install something more useful, like a multi card reader or even another SSD? I don’t see a point yet to replace the CPU or GPU as they are still adequate for my needs.
Thanks
Yesterday, I decided to upgrade it. I figured I might be able to upgrade the memory, possibly the graphic cards, and replace the single mechanical drive. It had, two drives, one mechanical and one SSD, an MSata, so I thought. I went online ordered a replacement drive and opened her up.
To my surprise, it didn’t have an MSata drive. It had a WD Black SATA mechanical drive and a Samsung Evo SSD stuffed into the one drive bay.
So, here are my questions. 1). Can I go ahead an add the MSata SSD as the boot drive, while keeping the other two drives (replacing the mechanical with another SSD)? 2). Since I almost never used the optical drive can it be replaced with another device - a multi card reader would be most helpful? 3). Is there any way to increase RAM past the 32gb already onboard and have the system recognize it? (I still have the original BIOS.) 4). Can the optical drive be replaced to install something more useful, like a multi card reader or even another SSD? I don’t see a point yet to replace the CPU or GPU as they are still adequate for my needs.
Thanks