E6520 Owner's Thread

Not sure about coning, but search dell.com for drivers.

 

Thanks a lot for the answer !
Do you like the 1080p ? Isn't too big for internet or excel ?

And, are you joking ? You paid 1480$ for

???

 

Unless your eyesight is bad, it can only help, and it makes a considerably large difference for productivity.

??

 

do u have any performance comparison in games between the geforce and quadro drivers? also how much have u overclocked? any tips or links to a guide on how to install the geforce drivers? thanks

 

+1

May be helpfull

 

+2, take your time and write a complete, detailed guide/post.

 

A company called Paragon offers a free software package that's useful when cloning hard drives. You can download it from Paragon Backup & Recovery Free Edition. It has a feature for creating a bootable CD, DVD or USB flash drive (I did a bootable USB flash drive and it's very quick and convenient). I had a third hard drive, and backed up the original drive to the 3rd drive and then restored to the new drive. Note that if you clone a Windows 7 drive and go from a larger source partition than the target partition, you sometimes have to shrink the source partition to get Windows 7 to work properly.

I have this cable for quickly hooking up 2.5" drives to the E6520's eSATA port and find it extremely useful: eSATA-USB combo (eSATAp) cable - $19.95 : NewmodeUS.

 

Thanks, I ordered one of those cables

 

A few questions on cloning my 500 GB drive to the new Seagate Momentus XT using Segate's Disk Wizard...

1. It seems that Disk Wizard always wants to make the new partition slightly bigger than the old which may be an issue depending on the actual available space on the new drive. Reading the Disk Wizard manual indicates that there is a manual cloning option that allows you to clone partitions selectively. Like most Dells, there's a 'D:/Recovery' partition that's 13.6 GB in size. Am I right in believing that I could copy just the C: partition and not have the D:/Recovery drive at all?

2. Are there any other suggestions that would address my potential issue? Maybe I can shrink the existing partition before doing the cloning?

Thanks in advance.

 

Possibly not, depending on where that partition is on the drive. There is a setting in the boot manager that states which partition the system drive is on. If your system is configured the same as mine (which it probably is, if it's OEM) then that recovery partition is the 2nd partition, and the system is the third (OEM partition is the first).

If you just copy the system partition on and not the first two, then the boot manager (if that gets copied at all) will say the system partition is the 3rd when it's actually the 1st. In which case the system won't boot. In this situation, you should be able to boot from a Windows 7 installation or repair CD/DVD/USB (google for how to create one; it would be best to do this before you do the copy so you have it on-hand) and Windows 7 will "repair" the system by pointing the boot manager to the proper partition.

Although I did the above myself (which is how I know that happens) I just copied the OEM and Restore partitions anyway. They "only" take up about 1.5GB and apparently there are some useful diagnostic utilities on them, should you ever need them.

This. Shrink your system partition before you do the copy. The built-in Windows 7 disk manager has this feature and it's easy to do. If you find it doesn't let you shrink it enough, or at all, run defrag first and then try it. If that still doesn't work download defraggler from Piriform - Download CCleaner, Defraggler, Recuva, Speccy and use it. It will let you see exactly what unmovable files are at the end of the partition and disallowing you to shrink it. Then, change those file attributes (System, Hidden, Read-Only) to allow them to move, or delete them. Often times they are System Restore files. All you have to do in that case is stop System Restore, which will automatically delete them.