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

June 5th, 2005
2 / 8

When it came to buying a new mobile PC, the choice was easy to make. I chose Alienware again mainly for the following reasons:

  • Great experiences with my first Alienware mobile PC with regard to quality, performance and support.
  • Ability to choose from high performance, quality and latest hardware when configuring your system
  • Alienware’s testing and quality assurance
  • Stylistic design

I also checked out machines from HP, Dell and MPC, and none of them could give me what I wanted, based on the points I mentioned above.

So I went on the Alienware website and started looking at the mobile systems they had. Alienware makes it easy for you to choose the right system by providing a nice comparison chart . Due to the kind of work I do and the things I use my system for, I soon came to the conclusion that the Area-51m 7700 was the system I needed. This model is essentially a desktop replacement mobile computer. This means that you can expect the same performance you would from a desktop computer. The disadvantages of this system are primarily that it is power hungry, which means that you won’t be able to work on battery power for too long (between 45-60 minutes on a new battery, less if you are gaming), and that it is bigger and a lot heavier than most laptops. Alienware also has the Sentia model, which is thinner and weighs less compared to the Area-51m 7700.

When I decided on which model was best for me, I went to the configuration page to configure my system. Configuring a system is very easy, you can see the price getting updated real-time as you change the configuration. For every item there’s a “more info” link where you can see more information about that item, usually causing you to drool a lot more. If you’re not sure about something, there’s an online live chat option where you can ask questions to an Alienware sales representative. I’m not so satisfied with the live chat service, because so far every time I used it, the person told me to call in to Alienware. One time I wanted to change an order I placed and couldn’t do it through live chat. I’m an international customer, so it would have been easier and cheaper for me if I could have done it through the live chat service.
I ended up with the following configuration:

Case: Area-51m 7700 Case with 17″ WideSXGA+ 1680 x 1050 LCD Display with Built-in Camera
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 Processor 560J w/ HT Technology 3.6GHz 1MB Cache
Motherboard: Intel 915P Chipset Supporting PCI-Express
Memory: 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SO-DIMM at 533MHz – 4 x 512MB
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Go with 256MB of DDR3 memory
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA
Harddisk 1 and 2: 60GB 7200 RPM ATA100 – Hitachi
DVD: 8X Dual Layer DVD+/-RW / 24X CD-RW Combo
Ethernet NIC: Integrated 10/1000Mb Gigabit Ethernet NIC
Wireless Network: External Wireless 802.11a/b/g PCMCIA Card
Modem: 56K Modem with V.92 Technology
Optional Mouse: Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 4.0