Dell 17.3" Intel Full-HD Touchscreen Laptops

is this reconditioned by dell or through a 3rd party?

The 8gb works as a smart cache memory after you’ve opened programs up, it helps them load faster (supposedly). I have used them in the past, they work OK, but they still don’t offer performance any where near a real SSD. Kind of a gimmick.

Well, I finally ordered one. I’ll drop in my SSD and mSATA SSD and wait for a good deal on a 1 TB SSD.

My bet is that these are Seagate hybrid drives. I have several of them. The drive loads the OS in this memory and the most frequently used applications that you use. I’ve been very pleased with these drives in how fast they boot. They are significantly faster at booting than a normal HDD and close to a full SSD. You won’t, however get the same capabilities for loading all your apps and data like a regular SSD. (Due to the limitation of the SSD front end of the drive) Also, you can’t write to the SSD portion either.

If these are Seagate drives, they are probably 7200rpm as well. Overall much faster than a regular 5400rpm HDD with lots of capacity but overall slower than a SSD. I have both and while I love my SSD drives, I also have computers with these hybrid drives and don’t feel the need to upgrade them right now.

I was very interested. Unfortunately, Windows 8 is a dealbreaker. So, I’ll keep patching up and nursing along my old Windows 7 laptop until Windows 10 comes along (let’s hope that it is a good OS).

Holy crap, does Windows 8.1 absolutely suck.

I’ve been using Windows since 3.1, and even put a toe in the water with Vista, but SHEESH!!! I cannot find ANYTHING! Can’t get hooked to a wireless network, and trying to troubleshoot is a nightmare of “try looking here…try looking there…try to not throw the new laptop through the wall…”

Try Classic Shell. A lot of wooters have good things to say about it. It gives you back your start menu and a few other things.

Learn to use the search function… tap the windows key and click the magnifying glass in the upper right corner. Type something like “Device Manager” and you’ll see a list of matches… It starts listing right away with the first key typed. Pretty handy for those of us coming from a previous version of Windows. I used this from the Start menu in Windows 7 previously and it’s a quick way to find anything.

Thank you for the advice… I had stumbled upon the places I needed to find for the most part, but seem to be unable to access certain settings. With my NT and Win7 machines, I can manage settings, both simple and advanced, but this Win8.1 POS seems makes getting access to those settings a maze the Minotaur would be proud of.

tl;dr - WHY WON’T RIGHT-CLICKING DO WHAT RIGHT-CLICKING HAS DONE IN WINDOWS FOR 20 YEARS?!?

Can’t wait for Win10 to hit.

Win10 updated without any issues, and is a much, much nicer OS to work with.

Thanks again for the suggestions on how to work with the (sucky) 8.1 - it was appreciated and useful.