Hey team - my Inspiron 1520 has just turned four.  The broken hinge (which Dell insists must have been damage and not caused by wear and tear on a bad design) makes me want to replace it before it dies for good.

I'm looking for a reasonably quick laptop for $1,500 ish (I am slightly flexible on price if necessary).  I do not want an ultra book.  I want to be able to store all my photos (90gb and growing) and other documents on the laptop.

My main preference has been to get two drives, a 120gb (or thereabouts) SSD, and a large Hard Drive.  500gb should suffice for now, but might just up the budget a bit and get a TB.  So I see my options are as follows.  Find a laptop that holds two drives for $1,200 - $1,300, or swap out the optical drive for a second drive.  The problem is I want a blu ray drive too!

So my questions are as follows:

1) What laptops in NZ have dual drives (preferably cheaper laptops)?  I would kind of like a 17" laptop, I thought they mostly had twin drives - but not all do.  
2) Should I have a fast SSD for a boot drive and a hard drive for docs? any problems doing this?
3) As I am going for a medium priced laptop, but want it to be quick... is a core i5 pretty good and future proof or should I try and get an i7?
4) is there anything I should know about buying a basic laptop, buying a ssd and installing windows on it etc?

5) If this is all too hard - can I install a ssd in my inspiron 1520 in place of the optical drive using one of the new bay things here: http://www.dhgate.com/2nd-hard-drive-caddy-adapter-for-inspiron/p-ff80808131ae191e0131af512a504577.html ?  My laptop is only sata 1.5 I believe, so would the benefits be worth installing a ssd for the boot drive?  I read somewhere that the optical drive might be pata which would cause me way to many difficulties I understand....

Hope that makes sense and someone can help me!

For the life of me I do not know why someone like DSE does not come out with a cheap laptop with a 60-90gb SSD and 500gb HDD, with mid range graphics, ram and cpu.  Is it just me or would that sell like hotcakes?

Cheers