Precision 7560 & 7760 Owners' Thread

You can make an image of your current Windows install, if you have room to store it. It will contain "everything" on your C: drive. Could be helpful "just in case" you forget something when transferring.

Go to the "old" control panel, "Backup & Restore (Windows 7)", and pick "Create a system image" from the left. It can go to another internal drive, an external drive, or a network drive. It will be a VHDX file that you can mount in Windows and pull anything off that you need.

Heck. When my mom was getting rid of her laptop, I imaged it in this manner and then restored the image in VMware so I have a working VM of her old machine.

 

You can use a contactless key card (like the one your university/workplace might issue to you) to log in to the laptop. I could get this working when I first bought my Precision 7530; after that, it never worked ever again.

 

Ah, I doubt I'd need a full image backup. I'm more concerned with stuff that might be stored in %APPDATA% and %LOCALAPPDATA%, as well as %USERPROFILE%. I think a simple copy-paste to OneDrive should suffice.

 

You have to remove the back cover, the battery and the KB. Reinstalling the KB ribbons wasn't too hard, but it wasn't fun either.
Instructions are here: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/...ustomer-replaceable-units-crus#Battery_Anchor

 

I have the exact same SSD in the gen4 slot as my boot drive and have had no issues whatsoever - however, I could not see it in slot 4...

 

OK, I was working in the Windows recovery console command prompt and I encountered a situation where the drive "vanished" or stopped working? I suddenly could not see files on it anymore. If would return nothing on "dir" and it would error if I tried to go into a directory that I hadn't been in yet. After rebooting to the console again, things were working. But that's spooky, never had that happen to me before...

(Haven't booted the OS on it yet.)

Moved the Samsung drive to one of the PCIe3 slots. The system recognized it right away. We'll see if that's better....

 

Some security keys, e.g., the Yubikey 5, support NFC. Using NFC means you don't need to plug the key into a USB port to populate a login's multifactor value field.

 

So could it be that the Samsung drive is not compatible in the Gen 4 slot or an issue with the slot on that particular computer? The one that came with my 7760 is a Samsung PM9A1 that I thought was an OEM version of the 980 Pro. Maybe it is a firmware issue on the 980 Pro?

 

Thank you all !

 

I will give it another go in the PCIe4 slot once I get the OS up and running properly, and do firmware updates (if necessary) for both the Precision 7560 and Samsung 980 Pro.