Upgrading Dell M4700 from 500G HDD to 1T Samsung Evo 850 SSD v-nand

Below is a list of things encountered when upgrading a Dell Precision M4700 laptop with Windows 7 with a 500G HDD to a 1 terabyte Samsung Evo v-nand 850 SSD.

• Used HDClone 7 Free Edition to make a copy of the current harddisk. Copied onto a Samsung T5 external SSD.  HDClone very nicely copies over everything, even from a live (running) Windows 7 machine. It creates all partitions also on the external SSD; these are visible as separate drives when reconnecting the USB drive. It can be even made bootable, but I didn't need that.


• Swapped in the SSD as shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6Cn3bONxEo
  Note how the SDD has to "click" with the notches of the bracket (metal frame).


• Put in the Dell Windows 7 SP1 DVD. It installed. For quite a while it shows "Windows is loading files...", but in the end it got through, after about 5-10 minutes.


• After logging in, the wireless device was not detected. So no internet. Also other drivers were not installed yet or failed:
  
  
  
So: "Ethernet controller", "Network controller", "PCI Simple Communications Controller", "SM Bus Controller", "Universal Serial Bus (USB) Controller", "Unknown device"


• Then tried to use the Dell 'Resource Media' DVD to install the drivers. But the usage of the program that starts then is just plain impossible to understand. E.g see the screenshot below:
  
  
  
  
  The touchpad is marked as installed (I think that the checkbox indicates that). When I then installed any other driver, no checkbox appeared at all on the left of any of them.
  Plus, what is the order to install the drivers? Found this post but seems a lot of manual work. Plus you have to know which devices you have in your machine to know which driver matches. Eg this post shows what driver to look for for one specific error. That list you should be able to find on the bill when you ordered your M4700.
  
  In the end managed to get the ethernet driver installed (filter on the word 'ethernet' on the Dell drivers page, you should find "Intel I2xx/825xx Gigabit Ethernet Network Controller Drivers")
  


• Then managed to get the internet connection working via a wired cable after installing the above ethernet driver. Then used the Dell's Analyze Detect Drivers option  to update the correct drivers in the right order.
  All but the 'Unknown device' errors where gone in the Device Manager. Didn't dare to update the BIOS since that was working fine before.


• After that about 180 windows updates to install and then all worked fine. Score of machine is now 7.3 on a scale of maximum 7.9 (no idea what it was before I upgraded):
  
  
  
  
  
  But I do notice the difference in startup for example: complete Windows 7 startup from powered off state is about 10-15 seconds. Not bad :)


• And then the tedious job of installing all non-OS software began...

Lessons learned for next time:

• HDClone is very handy
• Export all browsers's favorites before taking out the old disk. You can find the favorites back, but not in an easy importable format.
• Impossible to understand the Dell Resource Media DVD.  
• Keep the service tag of your M4700 ready.

What's not so good about my new Dell XPS 15 laptop (+ a bunch of good things)

Recenty I got a new laptop, again a Dell. I decided to go for a thin "ultrabook", the XPS 15, 16G RAM, 512G SSD. A good review you can find here. I didn't take the 4K version on purpose, since some reviews say it is struggling a bit with that. Plus some software just can't handle it, like Remote Desktop, so  you have to scale down anyway.

Here is an overview of the pros and cons I found while using it.

Pros

• Sleek design


• Thin


• A lot lighter than the M4700


• Smaller power-supply


• Fast; no problem with 3-4 IntelliJ workspaces open, over 50 Chrome tabs, DBeaver, Firefox with about 10 tabs

Cons

• Some backlight bleeding in the bottom right corner of the screen. Most notable when showing a black screen. Not really noticeable during daylight. Here's an example of a really bad case.


• Crappy keyboard; the page up-down, home, end keys can only be used by pressing the Fn key. If you are a coder, it's really annoying, since you use those keys a lot. Hope next time they make separate keys again.


• Corners get scratched easily if you put it in your bag without a protecting sleeve


• Sometimes a flicker (screen turns completely black) on the externally connected screen. Not sure yet if it's the cable.


• Screen can't fold back flat fully.


• For some reason the default resolution is set to 125% right after using it for the first time.


• The connection for the HDMI cable is on the side! And sometimes sits a bit in the way when using the mouse.


• The professional version of the XPS 15 named Precision 5520 should give you better quality components. But the warranty period has been reduced from 3 years to 1 year. Does it still make it worth to buy the over 500 euros more expensive Precision 5520? Apparently they don't dare to give a longer warrant anymore for the better quality components...

Just got a sleeve for the XPS-15, a CushCase. Ordered via Amazon. Took about 3 weeks to arrive. Fits in a regular mailbox. Fits the XPS-15 nicely; no need to really push.

What's crap about my new Dell Precision M4700 laptop (+ the few good things)

Just got my new Dell Precision M4700 laptop in, which is the top model of their range for 15" screens.
My last laptop was also a Dell Precision, the M4400. Having looked around to see if there's another brand I'd rather take, I still came to the conclusion that a Dell seems to be the best fit for heavy development.

So online I ordered it, with changing the default low 4G or 8G RAM to a more reasonable 16G. That's the first place where I noticed they are really overcharging for the additional RAM: 200 euro (about 261 dollars) for having put in 16G of RAM, while if you buy it seperately it's only about 100 euro. But since I don't like messing around with a brand new laptop (mainly because of warranty) I decided to pay the extra.

Here's a list of pros and cons of the laptop after using it for a few weeks:

Pros
- The power plug is straight, so it fits better in a block of power plugs, see the image below:

- It feels sturdy and solid.


Cons
- The power cord is still quite short. Why not just add 1 meter more?
- The plug that goes into the laptop is straight and at the back. Lots of times when you've got the laptop on your lap it will just fall out. Much better solution: an angled plug and plug it in on the side of the laptop.
- The keyboard has a numeric keypad. Why would you need that on a laptop? How often will data entry people use such a high end laptop? And it forces me to sit more to the left of the keyboard to be able to type... And I know I'll never ever use that numeric keypad... See image below:

- The Page Up and Page Down are placed at such a weird position. And it feels like they should be the other way around anyway: Page Down left, Page Up right...


- Right after I started it up for the very first time, I wanted to search in the Windows configuration screen. The whole machine just froze, I couldn't do anything else but hard-shutdown the machine via the power button. Ok this might be a Windows problem but still it shouldn't happen within 5 minutes...


- It's really hard to turn off the built-in webcam. Out of the box it will switch on automatically if a video stream comes in (or something like that). This should be the other way around by default. You can only turn it really off via system devices, not via the annoying pre-installed webcam control app.

- For creating a VMWare image of the same Windows 7 Professional OS as on this new laptop, you have to enter the Windows COA product key. And guess where they put it on the laptop? No not on the side or the bottom..... it is inside the battery compartment!! So when you're right in the middle of installation, you have to shutdown the laptop, take out the battery, write down the long key, put the battery in, start it all up again.... Djeezzz!!

- Multiple times I've had now that I put a VMWare guest in suspend-mode and that after that the light of the harddisk stays on "forever". I can hear it spin too. Even if after that I close the VMWare application, the harddisk keeps on going. When after that I put the laptop to sleep via the power button, it stops spinning. When I then turn it on again, the harddisk directly starts spinning again. In Windows Task Manager I can't find any process that is supposed to be reading or writing. So what is going on? Who is reading and/or writing? Is the disk crappy? After running diagnostics (during bootup) no problems are found. Is VMWare causing it? I can't reproduce it everytime, so can't really make a support call for it. But all 'n all it doesn't give me much confidence in the machine + setup combinatino.... I'm planning on re-installing the whole OS, so no Dell Recovery manager and other Dell software is on it anymore. Hope that makes it more stable...
- When I plug in a headphones cable on the left, my mouse keeps on bumping into the cable.


Well, that about sums up this "rant".... Next time I'll definitely re-consider whether I should purchase a Dell again....