Review: Buying an Alienware Area-51m 7700 Mobile Computer

You’d think that a lot of people know Alienware by now. Right? Wrong. You’d be surprised at how many people don’t know who or what Alienware is. I have to deal with this almost everyday. As soon as people see my mobile computer, they’re like “Wow! Nice laptop! What brand is it?” “It’s Alienware.” “Huh?” And then I have to explain to them what Alienware is. I usually end with “You can check them out at www.alienware.com.”

Not only do I sound like an Alienware commercial when I start talking about Alienware products, I also look like an Alienware ad throughout most of the week. I’m usually wearing an Alienware shirt, if not Microsoft, my backpack is Alienware, my mobile computer is Alienware, my mouse mat and mouse are Alienware, my tumbler is Alienware, my shoes? “Alienware?” No, but I wish they were.

This review is going to sound like a really long Alienware commercial. But rest assured I’m not totally biased and what you’ll read here is my honest opinion. With this review I primarily want to share my experiences with Alienware and their products, most of them are good, and some are not so good. Maybe this review can help you decide on buying an Alienware product and can prepare you for what you can expect, and show you what you should look at before you buy.

Before I talk about my latest mobile computer, I want to mention that I’ve been an Alienware customer for about two years now. I bought my very first mobile computer from Alienware in 2003. I configured it almost to the max, and it cost a small fortune. But it was money well spent. It never, and I mean never, gave me a problem and it performed really well. Maybe this may seem like a normal thing to most of you, but you have to understand how I (ab)use my computer.

I’m behind my computer more than 12 hours a day doing often really machine intensive work. My computer is on more than 15 hours a day, and sometimes a lot more. I do software development on it, which means at any given point I may be running 3 instances of Visual Studio at the same time, a large database, various development tools and a VMWare machine, apart from the usual smaller apps like Outlook running in the background. I also do graphics design using applications like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, which also may be running in case I need to do artwork for the software I’m developing. I also do 3D rendering and animations, so there are days when my machine is on doing intensive rendering, and I mean intensive, like taking 10 minutes for a 320×240 pixels frame.
There are days when 3DSMax is rendering in the background while I am running Visual Studio doing my usual development work. I kid you not.

So I think when we’re talking about a demanding environment for a mobile computer, this should come close. Imagine the beating my old laptop took. And still, I can honestly say that it always performed without a single problem. And even now while I got a new one after almost 2 years, I’m confident it is still good enough to last at least another 2 years.