As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was very excited about my first AlienWare laptop and I was counting down the days as until it arrived. It finally arrived on Wednesday so I took a slightly longer lunch and went back to the house to pick it up (I certainly didn’t want to leave it sitting on the front porch in case a ne’er-do-well decided it looked like it was worth some money).
The device is every bit as powerful as I expected it would be, even with only 8GB of RAM. Yet this brings me to my first gripe about the device. Okay… let’s consider the market for an Alienware laptop… usually a gamer who is all about squeezing as much power out of their laptop as they could possibly accomplish. Odds are, one of those things would be additional RAM. Goodness knows that is one of the things that I wanted to do. If that’s the case… why on earth did Dell make such a dumb choice in RAM placement.
You see… there are two banks of two SODIMM RAM slots on this device. The EASY ones to get to are simply done by taking out the battery, unscrewing the two little screws in the bay and then sliding the back plate off. The OTHER RAM slots require you to do the steps mentioned above as well as remove an additional series of about 8 screws to get the keyboard off, lift it up and disconnect the ZIF connector and slide the keyboard out.
Here’s your pop quiz… WHERE would you install the stock RAM on a device like this? Knowing full well that the tech buying it would likely add more RAM? Of course it is extremely logical to put the stock RAM in the EASY area so that when a gamer with a penchant for upgrading hardware wanted to add more he could… Okay. That’s right it’s NOT logical! Why on earth would you do something so ridiculous? I have no idea why but that is EXACTLY what Dell did on my device. I was expecting that I could simply add the extra RAM in the easy to reach section of the computer and all would be well. Looks like I was wrong.
Other than this obvious logical misstep in placement, I am relatively pleased with the laptop so far. Now if I can just finish this 10-12 page paper for my cyber-security class, I might actually be able to play some games on my laptop!