upgrade to larger SSD and newer NVidia graphics card for Omen 17t-w000 CTO

[emarie_23]

I apologize in advance for the question; I would have thought the answers would have been blatantly obvious somewhere in the product information but I am unable to find them.

I have a less-than-one-year-old HP Omen 17t-w000 laptop. The SSD is already full; thanks, Windows, and my bad, I should have purchased a larger SSD initially. I have moved most programs over to my fat, empty mechanical hard drive and am using an external SSD for high-performance applications right now but am interested in upgrading to a larger SSD for my C drive. Is this possible? Does it even make any sense to do?

Second upgrade question: is it at all possible to upgrade my NVidia 965 graphics card to any newer/larger card? I suspect I already know the answer to this one, but wanted to ask out of a frail and delicate optimisim.

Thanks for any additional information you can provide. And for not making too much fun of me. Live and learn, right?

Cheers.

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

Yeah we are all in the "trust tree" here and no ridicule. No dumb questions. In this case the answers are fairly simple. 

Yes, your laptop can take either a SATA or PCIe/NVME M.2 "gumstick" type drive and trust me you want the NVME/PCIe because they are 3-5 times faster than the SATA kind. 

HP loaned me the 15 inch version of basically the same Omen platform and I upgraded it from a dinky 128 gig SATA M.2 to a 512 gig NVME/PCIe disk with astounding improvement in performance. 

You already know the answer on the video chip. No upgrade sorry. 

Your service manual

https://www.amazon.com/Black-512GB-Performance-SSD-WDS512G1X0C/dp/B01MR4VOBZ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=...

Just follow the steps to remove the back cover and you will see the gumstick drive. You need to back up your drive so contents can be transferred to the new. 

There is a video I made showing me doing my upgrade floating around here somewhere. 

Post back with any more questions.

If this is "the Answer" please click "Accept as SOlution" to help others find it. 

[emarie_23]

Thank you so much! Esp. appreciate the recommendation for NVME/PCIe as I only have experience with SATA.

[emarie_23]

OK follow up here ... successfully completed physical part of upgrade (GAH! Those plastic clips!!) and used professional software package to clone old ssd to new but can NOT get laptop to boot from it. I understand that there are sometimes issues w Win 10 "seeing" an ssd drive and have tried multiple strategies from command line etc to make this happen but to no avail. It's probably something simple I'm just misunderstanding. All help greatly appreciated. (Yes I did change boot order in BIOS).

[Huffer]

So the BIOS sees the new SSD? What message do you get when you try to boot?

[emarie_23]

The BIOS only offers "Windows Boot Manager" as a selection, no specific HD listing. This should, from what I read, take it immediately to booting from laptop internal HD. Wrong?

[Huffer]

Try switching to Legacy boot from secure boot

[emarie_23]

It's already in secure boot rather than legacy.

[emarie_23]

oops sorry misread your answer

[emarie_23]

No worky. BIOS does see the new disk apparently and I'm able to select it from the list, but does not boot from it in either Legacy or Secure boot.