Upgrading Inspiron 7720 (17R Special Edition/Turbo Edition)

Hello Dell

I purchased a Dell Inspiron 17R SE (7720) high-end model about six months back.

Apart from throttling issues (sudden performance drop when on battery), its working fine. I purchased it for heavy multimedia programs (Such as Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop) and gaming.

It ran all the games in full HD on high settings without any performance issues.

But with new programs and games released few months ago (such as FarCry 3), this machine cannot perform at par with latest hardware. Also, over the time, a lot of dust must also have accumulated in the laptop components, hindering the airflow, which makes it heat up more than usual, and perform slower.

Anyway, its time for an update, and I want to be sure it will not void my warranty and the updates will be compatible with my system.

1. Battery: As all Inspiron 7720 users complain about it, this laptop has very poor battery life. So i wanna replace its small 6-cell battery with bigger 9-cell one. Although there is official release for any 9- or 12-cell battery for Inspiron 7720, I've come across one latitude battery that fits into all Inspiron Special Edition laptops. Check out these two links:

http://www.delllaptopbattery.co.uk/dell-m5y0x-batteries.htm

http://www.mini-laptop-accessories.com/97wh-9cell-dell-inspiron-17r-special-edition-7720-battery-p-21043.html

This 9-cell battery will fit into my Inspiron 7720 laptop, and it is a 97-watt hour model, which means the throttling problem and low graphics performace in battery mode will be solved as well. Am I right, Dell?

2. Hard Drive: My 1 TB hard drive is quite filled up already. (90 GB free space left), and my laptop has one free slot for additional hard drive, so its time for an upgrade. Here are the options i'm considering:

a. Add another 1 TeryByte 5400 rpm Hard Drive in the empty bay and configure them in RAID0. This will boost hard drive performance by double, but needs everything to be formatted and reinstalled, maybe it needs a BIOS reinstall as well (because the 32 GB mSATA SSD must also be reconfigured). Well that is not a big difficulty, since I can copy all my data into a portable/external Hard Disk and then put it back when upgrade is done.

b. Add another 1TB (or 2TB single Hard Drive if such thing is availabe) of 5400 rpm speed (never heard of a 1TB or larger HDD with 7200 rpm spin speed). This option will not help increase the performance, but it gives me additional space (double space) and i dont have to format anything either.

c. Sell my 1TB Hard Drive + 32GB mSATA, and purchase two SSDs (768 GB each) and put them in RAID 0. This is the most expansive option to consider (very very expensive actually), but after making such an update, with SSD, that too in RAID0 - double speed than normal SSD, the performance would be unmatched! Even if 768GB SSD is not available in India, i can opt for 512 GB SSDs.

If I do make this upgrade, will I get some money back if I sell my old Hard Drives (1TB 5400rpm HDD and 32GB SSD) back to Dell?

Also, I wanna enquire something here: If i remove the mSATA SSD, does that mean i can install one more HDD or SSD in that place? Or the slot for microSSD is too small for normal sized HDD/SSD?

3. Graphics Card: I wanna remove the 3D capability and 3DVISION for my graphics permanently. Because, nVidia's Shutter-glasses technology is not the only method to watch 3D. You can still use the red/cyan glasses with a stereoscopic player to watch movies, or play games in 3D using the other 3D vision Discover method shown in nVidia's control panel.

Sometimes, in this laptop, I've encountered problems when the 'Dell 3D Vision' option is simply deleted and I can only use the other 3D vision Discover, which is basically the red/blue glasses method to watch 3D content. This means that the in-built plugin was disabled somehow at that time, and it wouldnt work unless i restart the PC. So it means it can also be permanently disabled.

The reason for removing 3D VISION is, by disabling 3D capability, i will get the nVidia's Optimus technology, and also get to use the Intel HD 4000 graphics for old games when i dont really need my nVidia 650M graphics processor.

4. A simple servicing of my laptop. As i told before that the laptop has a lot of dust accumulated inside and heats up more often than before, I need to open it up and clean everything inside, and put more cooling paste on CPU and GPU units. That should make the machine work better for next 3-4 months i guess.

Now that i've told you all about what I want, tell me if there's anything else I can do to increase performance, such as RAM upgrade (I dont think my laptop has more slots - Its already filled with 8GB DDR3 - 2x4GB modules). Also, can I replace my CPU with a faster one? If so, will I have to pay all the money for new CPU or will they give some concession if I sell my old CPU back to Dell?

All in all, now let's talk business. How much will it cost me to make all those upgrades? The servicing and installing of Hard Drives should be covered under the warranty or not? And what is the cost if I will purchase both the 9-cell battery and Hard Drive/s from Dell itself? Tell me about pricing of each component/service separately.

Also, what is the time you may take to deliver the components and your serviceman to my house?

Remember that I got this laptop delivered TWO MONTHS after i ordered and payed for the laptop, because Dell used some crappy courier service (The Professional Couriers or something like that). You can ask about it from your representative Mr Jatin Ahuja (from Gurgaon) because I kept annoying him about my laptop's late delivery with phone calls everyday for two months!

I highly recommend using the Blue-Dart for future deliveries.