dude, my friend has latitude laptop that came with 9-cell battery, and both our batteries fit into each other's laptops. I tried it once. Yeah, when putting inspiron battery in latitude, it shows some low watt-hour warning, but with latitude battery in inspiron, it works fine. Don't know if it will last long though.
I'm booting from 256G mSATA, which holds win8pro plus all my applications. BOOTS IN SEVEN SECONDS!! For my own convenience, I have it partitioned into a couple of 120G partitions: C drive for OS & apps, and D drive for "data". The 1 TB slow drive I just use for backups, at present. In a few months (I'm waiting for price of SSDs to come down) I will pull the 1TB drive ...and replace it with a couple of large SSDs. This machine only ever sits on my desk, so I'm not complaining about the battery life- not much you can really expect running a full-HD screen and a quad core i7...
As far as the battery goes, these will NOT fit your laptop. Rather, though they will snap in, the lid of the laptop, if you notice it from the back, will come down behind the laptop and hit the extra battery length. You apparently did not read your links very well either. If you would have, you would have seen the following warning by the seller stating:
"If your laptop is the Dell Inspiron Series, like Dell Inspiron 14R, 15R, 17R Series, please do not order this 6600mAh battery, because of it not allow the laptop's lid open fully. " (** Their grammar issue mot mine, it's a straight copy/paste quote **)
Also, you should purchase an external drive enclosure with SSDs or other hard drives (I prefer SSDs due to hard disk life being very hit and miss for external bumped around drives) as you can not raid internal drives on this laptop and in all practicality you should simply use better disk space management practices, deleting older unused or otherwise archive-able or way less often used data to the external drive, that you could bring along on trips, etc. if need be.
As for your graphics issue, you can certainly disable the nvidia chip in BIOS and use the intel in-CPU graphics, though your laptop will be a LOT slower, and will likely not give you much better battery life since it will most likely still draw power, just not as much since it will simply be idle.
More cooling paste will never give you a performance increase. It may have a VERY small increase in cooling performance, but you should be able to run your computer full-bore without it throttling due to cooling issues. If you are in a dusty environment, simply buy some compressed(canned) air and spray it in your exhaust ports. Opening up your computer and messing too much with it will likely void your warranty and could damage the unit. Please also do so with it turned off, as you don't want a static discharge/shorting from the dust cloud you're making.
Good luck with all that, and next time, build your own desktop with all the performance you need, and get a thin/light laptop for travel and be happy.
I have had this model for over 3Y now & upgraded one of the 750GB HDD to a 1GB Samsung SSD & the other to a 2TB Seagate HDD, so plenty of storage space. I use the master card as a document store now as the drives do not need to be any faster. I ordered a backlight keyboard from Dell & got a laptop cover sticker to improve the appearance. The RAM is 8GB & the CPU/GPU are fast enough. The battery has died, but I have not bothered to replace this as yet. Only issue with the machine is overheating so the fan needs to be cleaned every 6M which is a pain to get to. Great laptop if a bit big/heavy.
ejn63
9 Legend
•
87.5K Posts
0
January 12th, 2013 04:00
That battery is for an E-series Latitude - it will not fit your Inspiron.
udaynatt
70 Posts
0
January 12th, 2013 06:00
dude, my friend has latitude laptop that came with 9-cell battery, and both our batteries fit into each other's laptops. I tried it once. Yeah, when putting inspiron battery in latitude, it shows some low watt-hour warning, but with latitude battery in inspiron, it works fine. Don't know if it will last long though.
Graham Jupp
51 Posts
0
January 13th, 2013 14:00
Actually some buyers are receiving the bracket preinstalled even without a second drive, my 7720 does seem to have one after a quick inspection.
ghees
13 Posts
0
January 17th, 2013 13:00
My 7720 came with the second hd bracket installed as well :-)
udaynatt
70 Posts
0
January 18th, 2013 03:00
Asking this might be crazy, but is there a way i can turn my already installed 32GB cache SSD into a regular disk drive?
ejn63
9 Legend
•
87.5K Posts
0
January 18th, 2013 04:00
It's too small for a Windows installation, but yes, it can be done. You need to change the SATA mode to AHCI in BIOS setup and reload everything.
udaynatt
70 Posts
0
February 13th, 2013 08:00
Yeah. 2x1 TB HDD, plus 256GB mSATA SSD..
You can have a whopping 2.25 TB space, and speed of SSD for all your programs (256 GB is enough, store movies n stuff in HDDs).
If i could only get a decent 9-cell battery for this, i can put the 2-lakh alienware 17x systems to shame :D
090909
41 Posts
0
February 13th, 2013 11:00
I'm booting from 256G mSATA, which holds win8pro plus all my applications. BOOTS IN SEVEN SECONDS!! For my own convenience, I have it partitioned into a couple of 120G partitions: C drive for OS & apps, and D drive for "data". The 1 TB slow drive I just use for backups, at present. In a few months (I'm waiting for price of SSDs to come down) I will pull the 1TB drive ...and replace it with a couple of large SSDs. This machine only ever sits on my desk, so I'm not complaining about the battery life- not much you can really expect running a full-HD screen and a quad core i7...
djbis
12 Posts
0
February 27th, 2013 13:00
I am confused. I just ordered the 17 Special Edition, it comes with the 32GB mSATA, which only appears to be cache memory? And a 1TB Drive.
The sales person sold me on the mSATA unit being the C:/ drive! Is the 5400RPM 1TB drive the C:/ drive?
Please, respond only if you are certain! No assumptions.
Thanks a lot!
ejn63
9 Legend
•
87.5K Posts
0
February 27th, 2013 13:00
The mSATA drive is indeed a cache/rapid start partition. It cannot be used as a system drive (it's too small for that).
Vladell
4 Posts
0
September 14th, 2013 04:00
Search "HDD caddy" on e bay. For about 6$ you can add an another HDD in place of your DVD ROM
sanjaybr
3 Posts
0
October 27th, 2013 09:00
Hi, I too have a similar confusion. Which of the following upgrades are recommended:
1. 16gb ram + 64GB msata (for using the Intel rapid start, if it is possible) + second 1TB hdd
2. 16gb ram + 128gb msata (will disabling the caching help upgrading the msata in this case?)
3. 16gb ram + replace 1tb default hdd with regular sata of 250/512gb?
RH613
1 Message
1
February 8th, 2014 06:00
As far as the battery goes, these will NOT fit your laptop. Rather, though they will snap in, the lid of the laptop, if you notice it from the back, will come down behind the laptop and hit the extra battery length. You apparently did not read your links very well either. If you would have, you would have seen the following warning by the seller stating:
"If your laptop is the Dell Inspiron Series, like Dell Inspiron 14R, 15R, 17R Series, please do not order this 6600mAh battery, because of it not allow the laptop's lid open fully. " (** Their grammar issue mot mine, it's a straight copy/paste quote **)
Also, you should purchase an external drive enclosure with SSDs or other hard drives (I prefer SSDs due to hard disk life being very hit and miss for external bumped around drives) as you can not raid internal drives on this laptop and in all practicality you should simply use better disk space management practices, deleting older unused or otherwise archive-able or way less often used data to the external drive, that you could bring along on trips, etc. if need be.
As for your graphics issue, you can certainly disable the nvidia chip in BIOS and use the intel in-CPU graphics, though your laptop will be a LOT slower, and will likely not give you much better battery life since it will most likely still draw power, just not as much since it will simply be idle.
More cooling paste will never give you a performance increase. It may have a VERY small increase in cooling performance, but you should be able to run your computer full-bore without it throttling due to cooling issues. If you are in a dusty environment, simply buy some compressed(canned) air and spray it in your exhaust ports. Opening up your computer and messing too much with it will likely void your warranty and could damage the unit. Please also do so with it turned off, as you don't want a static discharge/shorting from the dust cloud you're making.
Good luck with all that, and next time, build your own desktop with all the performance you need, and get a thin/light laptop for travel and be happy.
gzhtub
12 Posts
0
March 23rd, 2016 09:00
I have had this model for over 3Y now & upgraded one of the 750GB HDD to a 1GB Samsung SSD & the other to a 2TB Seagate HDD, so plenty of storage space. I use the master card as a document store now as the drives do not need to be any faster. I ordered a backlight keyboard from Dell & got a laptop cover sticker to improve the appearance. The RAM is 8GB & the CPU/GPU are fast enough. The battery has died, but I have not bothered to replace this as yet. Only issue with the machine is overheating so the fan needs to be cleaned every 6M which is a pain to get to. Great laptop if a bit big/heavy.