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

Everything else seemed to be OK with my system though. I formatted the hard disk and installed Windows XP Professional on it after I checked the system specifications. I had some issues to get Windows installed and working. It appeared that from time to time the system would act very strange and Windows would hang or reboot. At first I thought it was a problem with one of the hard disks, because of the errors being reported in the eventlog. I spent a good day troubleshooting and was ready to call to Alienware to complain about a problem with one of the hard disks, when I decided to RTFM. And in the manual there was a very important line mentioning that the drivers for the system had to be installed in a particular order (Chipset, Audio, Modem, Network, Video, Hot-key, Touchpad, Wireless, etc.). Not only that, you had to follow the exact instructions inside the manual of when to let Windows handle the driver installation and when to do it manually.
So when I reinstalled Windows, and followed these exact procedures, everything worked well. In all my 10 years of working with computers, I have never come across something like this. I mean sure, I know that you should first install the Chipset drivers, but never would I have expected that the order in which you install a Videocard driver and Modem driver for example would matter.

Up till now, after about 4 months of use, the system has performed really well. I’m not going to bore you with benchmarks and graphs of the system’s performance in various games and things like that. Suffice to say that the system performs as you would expect from any system with the same configuration. In short: Extremely fast.

As I mentioned earlier, the only disadvantage I have is that the system is a powerhungry monster, and I can’t work on battery power for more than 45 minutes. In addition, when the machine is off, it takes at least 4 hours to fully charge the battery. And when the system is on, it can take more than 12 hours to fully charge the battery. I’m not kidding.
Another disadvantage is that the system is big and heavy. It is even heavier than the previous Alienware system I had, so I had to get used to carrying it around. However, these disadvantages only come with the model I chose, the Sentia systems Alienware has are lighter and use less power.

So far the system has never failed to impress people, the stylistic design and the glowing alien eyes never fail to attract attention. Even the backpack looks impressive, and has these white lines made of reflecting material which light up when you are in an area with certain lighting conditions. You have to see the effect yourself to be able to see how cool it is.

Overall I am very satisfied with my system and with Alienware’s support up till now (for more on Alienware support see the next page), apart from the dead pixel. If you need top performance, quality and style, your next mobile computer should be an Alienware. Just make sure they can guarantee you a screen without dead pixels on arrival.