Samsung Series 7 Chronos, help needed to make it just a little better.

H all.

Woooot!!! Today I finaly have my hands on my all new Samsung Chronos 7 i5 with 8850m, so I feel like I belong now heehe.

Can anyone tell me how to
no1 make a disk backup image to an external hard drive via usb 3.0?
no2 how to remove the back safely so I can replace the current hdd with a 500gb ssd, I want to know the way to install it to get the fastest possible boot times etc.
no3 if I need to send off for repair or anything, do I need to put the original drive back in and woud I need to reinstll windows on that drive or will it jst work once it is reconnected?
no4 has anyone tried to overclock the i5 or the 8850? what would be good overclocks for them so as not to risk damaging them?
no5 I think this laptop hs some ram soldered on the board? would it be of beefit to replace the existing sodimm witn 2 x corsair vengeance 8gb 1866 modules?
no 6 Does the laptop have an msata port internally or is the cache drive soldered to the motherboard?
no7 I have an intel advanced n 6300 mini pci-e wifi card, does anyone know if this would work in this laptop? I have no need for the current bluetooth enabled card but I would like higher transfer speeds on my wifi.

Many thanks for any help, just want my new super cool laptop to b as awesome as possible.

 

Can you please give the exact model number so people can be sure of the hardware specs.

John

 

Hi, sorry for the slow reply, the exact model as per the box is NP780Z5E-T01UK.

Also, it has been running quite sluggish, maybe this is because it is installing updates or something or maybe, just I am used to SSD speeds, but I think it may be more than that.

Thanks

 

I see that model has a 5400 rpm HDD. It will make the computer feel sluggish if you have become used to SSD performance.

You computer probably includes Samsung Recovery Solution 6. This, I believe, includes the capability to either create a bootable flash drive or clone the HDD. See here for some discussion but there is more in other threads such as this. You should also read the owner's thread.

John

 

Almost everything you ask is discussed extensively in that Owners Lounge thread which John linked. Member pranktank has even included a lot of answers in the opening post of that thread.

The only thing I don't remember seeing in that thread is about replacing the WiFi adapter. However, there is lots of discussion about that in the Owners Lounge thread for 2012 Series 7 NP700Z5C. Start reading here.

I was puzzled about the cache drive you mention. Whereas previous Series 7 models DID indeed have an ExpressCache feature (using an iSSD soldered on the motherboard) that feature was not included in 2013 models. Are you sure your model has such a cache?

 

hi, thanks ill be sure to check out the threads linked. Was not certain of the cache drive aas just hopeful I guess a n extra msata connection would be usefull but there is none.
Thanks again.

 

Thank you for confirming that. Yes I agree, an mSATA slot in this model (in addition to the 1TB HDD) would make it vastly more interesting for me as well. Either for a cache drive or a small Windows & apps drive.