for cooling pad, you can get coolermaster notepad u3/u3 plus, or cm storm sf-19 (i think this one is better). i think you can find skin protectors at taobao. (why do you need this for?) i'm not sure about screen protectors. maybe taobao has it too.

Oh sweet aw18 is a good machine.

hm my experience at taobao is actually good. There was one minor incident that the seller sent less quantity of the goods i ordered. They immediately topped up and delivered the balance to me. The rest were all good.

maybe you should pick the sellers with a lot of crown status (blue or gold), although I haven't had issues with diamond sellers also.

Pm putochip123 and e_mc_square. These two are experts here.

What model you own?

As you emphasis "Gaming ONLY"
8 GB is more than enough for gaming.

the only upgrade that you can feel the difference is using ssd as boot, software, and game drives.

for sata ssd, currently samsung 850 pro should be one of the best. get 512gb or larger for single drives, or make a raid0 with 2x or more smaller drives (like much cheaper liteon s900 256gb). sandisk extreme pro should be ok also.

cl9, cl10, cl11 are memory timings. 1600mhz is memory clock speed. you can go for smaller timing, higher clocks if you want to, but i don't think you can feel the differences between normal and performance ram. you can check out brands like g.skill and crucial also.

as for the ram size, if possible go for full 32gb, then use the excess for system optimizations (ram-based caching for ssd/hdd, ramdisk, etc.). try it out then compare it to the same system without such optimizations. the pagefile can be set to small ones (like 200mb min to 1gb max) to save space. (it's likely that this system file will never be used but just make sure it's there. until now i still have some systems running 0 pagefile without issues)

because there is nothing in the new ssd, of course you need to do something to make it bootable. the easiest way is to do a clean os install. to do that you need windows install media and grab drivers from dell support site. alternatively you can clone or create a system image based on your current system and perform system restore in the new ssd.

always keep the stock hdd intact before you confirmed everything is working.

yes you can. i never used that before.