Scullcap Alienware M17
For years I have dreamed of owning an Alienware laptop, all of my desktop computers are at my office so other than my Fujitsu laptop I don’t have a serious computer for at home. Looking over the Internet I found a sparse number of reviews of the M17 none of which provided any really good information for me the consumer. Alienware is renowned for their customizable configuration so reviewing them can be difficult due to the multitude of configurations available.
The following is my configuration of the M17 for this review.
- CPU – Core 2 Duo T9550 2.66Ghz
- GPU – Dual Radeon 3870 Mobility in Crossfire X
- RAM – 4GB DDR3
- Screen – WUXGA 17″ 1920X1200
- HDD – 128GB SSD
- NIC – Intel Wireless N with MIMO
- OS – Windows Vista Home Premium
- Headphones – Alienware TactX
- Orion Backpack
Total Price including shipping to Canada $3005 US
Ordering and Intial impressions
The order process was not as easy as expected I had to call the billing line because I am outside of the US. After a quick call to validate my credit card information the order was processsed. Much like Dell I was able to follow the build process of the laptop over the 9 phases of assembly, testing an shipping. I opted for the standard Fed Ex shipping offered from Alienware. Shipping was amazingly fast I had the laptop at my door in 2 days. The system comes in a big black box which contained another box with laptop and accessory pack. The M17 itself was covered with an alienware form fitting felt sleeve. The accessory package is top notch from the leather bound instruction manual to the monsterous 3lb power supply. Even the connecting cables for the powersupply are thicker than average and higher quality than found on most laptops. Pulling hte M17 out of the box and opening the felt sleeve is remenat of a scene from 2001 Space Odyssey all that was missing was the music playing in the background. The casing feels like the material the bat suit is made of. Softer to the touch but a hard protective shell. On my M17 I opted for the original SkullCap lid. Opening the lid for the first time it felt substantial and rigid no concerns about flexing even with a 17″ screen. Overall I am quite impressed with the look and feel of the unit. The only minor flaw I can find is that there is a slightly raised section where the indicator lights and quick touch buttons are but its nothing that impeeds the usabilty or cosmetics.
Side View Alienware M17
Basic Usage
It is difficult to call this Laptop a Laptop seeing as you cannot use it on your lap without a hard surface between your legs and the computer. There are some small vents on the bottom of the case that are not to be blocked. At close to 10 lbs the laptop is also a little on the heavy side but overall it is easy to manouver around. Picking it up with one hand is still an option and when you do there is no flexing of the chasis when lifting. I for one am willing to deal with a slightly more bulky laptop to have the security of a rigid chasis that doesn’t feel like it will break if you breathe on it wrong. I expected this beast to sounds like a 747 when I fired it up but was extremely surprised to hear almost nothing. The SSD drive is partially responsible for the lack of noise from the case. Under normal usage conditions you can barely hear the cpu fan making the M17 an extremely enjoyable desktop replacement while maintaining the mobility of a laptop. There are some minor annoyances under regular usage with the ergonomics. The touch pad is not easy to operate but with some tweaking of the sensitivity I’m sure it will be fine. Most of the time I am using a trackball or wireless mouse on the machine anyway so its not of major concern. The front edge of the case has a somewhat hard edge where your arms are resting so if the position of the computer in height relative to your arms is important to avoid serious rubbing of your wrists on the edge when typing. I found that having the keyboard slightly below so that you wrists are slightly bent when typing will aleviate that minor ergonomics problem.
Wireless performance is incredible, When connected wireless to my WRT160N or my WRT300N router I am pulling speeds of up to 1.8MB/Sec on download, when connected to an old WRT54G wireless G router I was pulling sustained 600KB/s to 900KB/s on torrent downloads.
The keyboard responds to soft touches well and is a little on the loud side for a keyboard but I am ok with that I don’t mind a loud keyboard when typing. The port configuration for USB and audio is extremely user friendly with enough ports on the right side of the machine to facilitate you needs. The volume wheel yes wheel no more annoying buttons works smoothly and responsive and is located in a place that is very easy to operate.
Configuration and Installed Software
The OS fired up in quick time comared to other vista instalations. I opted for both the VitaKey fingerprint scanner and the facial recognition biometric data for logging into Windows. I have never been a fan of these kind of devices in the past they have not been reliable. It has been a week now and between the fingerprint scanner and the facial recognition it is easy and faster getting into windows than using the traditional password input. The fingerprint scanner sometimes take a couple of swipes but in decent lighting conditions the facial recognition usually logs me in before I get to the second finger swipe. Much to my surprise and delight there was NO demo software in the windows installation when I fired up windows. No trials of office, no wildtangent games, no antivirus trial bugging you. All that was on the computer was an installation of power DVD and required device drivers. Finally a computer that didn’t need hours of software tweaking before I could be happy using it. So far so good, I have opted to keep this machine pretty clean and run alot of open source software here is the list of apps that I have installed and are running for productivity.
HTML Editing – Notepad ++
Image Editing – GIMP
Browser – Firefox
Media Player – VLC for video and Media Player for Music. I really dont use Media Center for anything as I hate it with a passion.
Email and Messaging – Windows live essentials
Thats about it for the software portion of this review I haven’t chosen an office suite yet but will most likely use open office. The one bit of advanced configuration required is to reconfigure the soft touch quick launch buttons above the keyboard. See below for how to configure the buttons on the M17, I have listed my configuration for the buttons. You can copy and paste the entire code block and save the file with extension .reg then double click the file to merge the contents into the registry.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MobilePC\HotStartButtons\1]
“ApplicationPath”=”\”C:”\\Program Files (x86)\\Windows Media Player\\wmplayer.exe\””
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MobilePC\HotStartButtons\2]
“ApplicationPath”=”\”C:”\\Program Files (x86)\\Windows Media Player\\wmplayer.exe\””
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MobilePC\HotStartButtons\3]
“ApplicationPath”=”\”C:”\\Program Files (x86)\\Windows Media Player\\wmplayer.exe\””
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MobilePC\HotStartButtons\4]
“ApplicationPath”=”\”C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Mozilla Firefox\\firefox.exe\””
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MobilePC\HotStartButtons\5]
“ApplicationPath”=”\”C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Windows Live\\Mail\\wlmail.exe\””
Gaming Performance & Benchmarking
On the desktop there was a shortcut to a file named ‘My Alienware PC Information’ the path to the file “C:\Windows\System32\Alienware\My PC Information.XML”. In this file is all the information about my laptop including all of the benchmark runs and it is formatting like an Area 51 secret document. Below you will find the results from the burn in benchmark tests run on my specific machine. The rest of the document contains specific details about the components and drivers.
Burn-In/Benchmarks
3DMark 2006
3DMark Score- 13,081.00 3DMarks
SM2.0 Score- 5,712.00
HDR/SM3.0 Score- 7,477.00
CPU Score- 2,410.00
Game Score- 0.00 Points
SM2.0 Graphics Tests
GT1 – Return To Proxycon- 46.22 FPS
GT2 – Firefly Forest- 48.99 FPS
CPU Tests
CPU1 – Red Valley- 0.77 FPS
CPU2 – Red Valley- 1.20 FPS
HDR/SM3.0 Graphics Tests
HDR1 – Canyon Flight- 87.19 FPS
HDR2 – Deep Freeze- 62.36 FPS
Unreal Tournament 3 Demo
Average FPS- 59.31 FPS
Time Spent Over 30 FPS- 99.76 percent of total benchmark time was spent above 30 FPS
Pretty impressive results in a laptop I have to say. I quickly installed steam and downloaded my instal for Drakensang and Unreal Tournament 3 both games played with high framerate at full detail 1920X1200 resolution. I am more than happy with the results of the gaming performance. As far as the noise level when gaming, well what can you expect from a highpower machine playing games you need to have some serious cooling power to keep things running stable. After playing Drakensang for 4 hours straight there is no issues with the laptop getting overly hot and or reduced performance.
Conclusions
Pros: Amazing customer experience, Magnificant machine, Great gaming performance, Very quiet under normal usage conditions.
Cons: Hard edge on the front of the case is a little rough on the wrists under certain operating conditions, Bulky power supply.
The fastest processor on the alienware site is not 2.33, it’s alot more than that, click on configuration (or customize) option of the laptop or desktop you are viewing, and then you can see the range of processors it has.
I can understand you wanting to post on the blog to get yourself a backlink but dude you really need to read the posts and make comments relevant to the post. IF you continue to post without posting a valid comment you will be banned and your email address submitted to akismet as a spammer.
I just ordered mine with dual ATI Radeon 3870’s and dual core extreme processor @ 2.66ghz with 3GB of RAM
Mine hasnt come as quick as 2 days but im very excited for it, seeing as ill actually be able to play any game with a decent frame rate.
( I live in Virginia BTW, im surprised to see it came to Canada faster than to Virginia.)
It took two days for shipping after the laptop was built. You need to keep checking the the orderstatus page to see what phase the laptop is in. Once shipped it should take no time to get there. FedEx is an awesome shipping company. The laptop is awesome, there are only a couple of annoying things like the front mount DVD tray that gets opened by accident sometimess and the sharp edge on the front of the chassis. Other than that I love it, do make sure to get yourself a lapdesk to hold it if you plan on using it on your lap (especially during gaming sessions it gets really hot).
Hope you enjoy yours as much as I am enjoyinh mine.
Well I read those reviews also, but I had my heart set on the M17 and I was not let down. The reviews I read where on base models not equipped as mine is as you will see in the review.
People … do not buy from Alienware. We bought one 18 months ago. My son was so excited, he saved up the money himself for this computer. However, it had to be returned twice for repairs. On the 2nd time they did something wrong with the motherboard and and it still didn’t work, so we sent it back to them a THIRD time. After that repair, when they shipped it back to us via Fedex, the computer was LOST by Fedex! Fedex admitted their error and told me to have Alienware generate the claim with them. Alienware somehow thought I was pulling a scam on them and treated me like a thief! They have avoided my calls for 3 months — all this time our computer has been missing. Finally, someone, 4 months later began to work with me only because I threatened to hire a lawyer. Lo and behold, now they are replacing our laptop but it’s not as good as the one that was lost — they say that it’s the same or better, but it’s not. Even the case isn’t as cool as the original case was. Plus, they won’t give us a warranty on the replacement product. Alienware’s customer service is horrible and I will never buy from them again. Who cares if it’s a cool computer? If they treat customers like they stole a computer, even though Fedex was admitting freely that they truly lost the computer, well, that’s a horrible company if you ask me. Don’t buy from them. I even told the guy at Miami headquarters that I was going to be a vocal customer if they didn’t satisfy us, and he didn’t care. So I’m blogging everywhere I can …… Beware, from Houston Texas
It is a shame that you had so many issues dealing with Alienware. I found the ordering experience and customer service was very good however I have not had to deal with any warranty service as of yet. (knock on wood). I feel for your son and what you went through dealing with Alienware.
Bought a high spec M17 which ran great for eleven months then a problem with raid control wiped the hard drives. I phoned Alienware who told me to send it back for repair, I asked how long I would have to wait and the answer was 3 months!!! I had the repair done by a local computer shop instead and had the machine back in three days. Two weeks later the hard drives wiped themselves again. Back to the shop who did a second repair free of charge. Two weeks later it happened again, took it back to the shop who announced there was a problem with the motherboard and should get it back to Alienware. At this point the computer was a year old and two weeks! I phoned Alienware who told me it was out of warranty by the two weeks and would have to charge me for a new motherboard, they also told me the motherboard would cost almost as much as a new computer and I should purchase a new one! The first PC cost £2000!!
Avoid Alienware at all costs they are an absolute joke, they couldn’t care less, their support team are terrible and they just rip you off!!
Over priced tat!
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