Greetings, Again...

Hey all, I haven't been around in the forums much lately because I learned so much a few years back, and things have come a long way. I haven't had any malware issues in forever from things I learned here and Windows Defender has come a long way from when I was plagued with junk. Anyway, I did some searching and couldn't find quite exactly what I'm looking for so I'll just post it up and see. If there is a particular thread that fits my query, feel free to point me to it.

I have 2 laptops with Win10 Pro on both, legit copies, updated, all good. One of them is a few years old, a Dell Inspiron 15-3567 traditional laptop. I've done some upgrades to it such as; swapped out the 1TB HDD for a 500GB SK hynix SATA SSD, doubled the OEM SK hynix 8GB RAM with a matching module to the max 16GB DDR4 SODIMM @ 2400mhz, swapped the optical drive into an external enclosure and caddy mounted the oem HDD into its spot, replaced the clock battery on the mobo, installed a dual band LAN card, and bought a new Dell main battery. The original battery @ 4+ years old is still about 80% capacity so I have 2 good batteries that I can swap back and forth. It's been a good laptop for a base model and it's even better now. That was my first time even opening up a laptop. I have quite a bit of experience inside a desktop but I was always a little intimidated to get into a laptop but that has all changed.

So now I have this Dell Inspiron 15-7586 2 in 1. It ships with a 256GB NVMe PCIe SSD and 8GB DDR4 RAM @ 2666mhz. I bought it "new" from a seller on Amazon who "upgrades" them and pumps them out around the holidays. I assume he buys them in bulk straight from Korea by the looks of the packaging it came in. So I got it with the 256GB oem SSD + a 2TB HDD and 24GB RAM (8GB hynix oem + 16GB Adata) I wasn't impressed by the performance considering it is a 7000 series compared to a 3000 series with a newer processor. They are both Intel Core machines, the older is an i3 and the newer an i5 so in my opinion, the newer pc should have run circles around the old one but it didn't. They were almost equally matched and that was before I upgraded the older laptop. Post upgrade, old faithful actually outperforms this new kid. So, now I am going to do some work to it because after a little over a year, the internal main battery won't hold a charge for more than 20 minutes without being plugged in. I don't use this one much differently than I did the old one so I'm wondering why the battery went south so fast when the older one with removable external battery is still 80% capacity after almost 5 years. I looked around to see if anyone sold a better battery but didn't find anything. I'm not buying one from Dell direct because, even if they did had any in stock, their prices are way out of whack compared to no brand or Dell resellers on eBay, which is where I got the second one for the older machine. It appears to be a genuine Dell battery and it performs well so I'm happy with it.

So I am shopping for a battery but I have purchased another 8GB hynix RAM module to match what I have oem and get rid of the Adata 16gb and a 1TB HK hynix NVMe PCIe gold 128layer NAND drive to replace the 256gb WD drive which is the C:/ OS drive. I don't think I have 2 PCIe slots on the mobo so I'll just be keeping the configuration with the 2 TB HDD. So besides any suggestions on the battery issue, The new drive is 1TB and I know the OS doesn't use anywhare near that so should I split the drive up with partitions? Keep say 256GB for the OS and use the rest as another storage partition? If so, what would be the best approach to this concerning software such as migrating and partitioning and other hardware for the swap? I have several external devices available and I have mini tool plus the SK hynix drive comes with migration tools from what I can gather.

 

I waited too long for an edit but just in case there's a question as to how I did the first drive swap in the older laptop and I'm seeking advice for this one, I did a clean install of Win10 Pro on the new drive from the old HDD having win10 Home on it. I left that alone and had a heck of a time when I first booted it up because it had 2 drives with Windows on them and I want to avoid that situation this time even though I won't have Windows on the second drive but I also didn't split up the new SSD in the other machine, I left the entire 500GB to Windows and it's a lot of "wasted" space.

 

OK, simplified version... Can I get some opinions on ways to install/replace an NVMe PCIe M.2 ssd in my laptop, partitioning options, and any software that may be helpful to complete the swap without too much trouble?