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Replacing my Gaming Laptop at Last

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Humorously, one of the more recent posts I made on this blog was when I purchased my Asus RoG Strix Scar II in 2019, over four years ago. That laptop served my needs for those four years and was a major upgrade from my old Alienware m17. However, at the beginning of 2023, I started streaming on Twitch for fun, thanks to my XBox Game Pass giving me access to a large library of games that I previously would not have access to or would not otherwise want to play.

At the same time this began, my RoG developed a strange illness in which its power supply would randomly not charge the battery. This means that when you unplug the laptop from the power supply (even if the battery shows a charge), there is a 50/50 chance that it will die instantly. Furthermore, the Bluetooth module (which I use for my mouse and gaming controller) would randomly just disappear in Windows for no apparent reason. I usually had to fix this by completely opening the laptop, jiggling the Bluetooth module, closing the laptop, and hoping that it will work.

Thanks to a gift from Uncle Sam, I had some money ahead after the tax season, so my wife agreed to let me pick up a new gaming laptop within a certain price range. I spent weeks researching and ultimately decided to return to the world of Alienware. My first gaming laptop (as you will likely remember from a previous post) was an Alienware laptop, which lasted for a long time. Most of the top gaming laptops I researched (including the newer ASUS RoG, MSI Titan, and Razer Blade) have a very long delay for delivery – I am talking months before I could even get my hands on any of them. The few that I could order directly were lower powered than the Alienware or much more expensive (some topping out at $7k+).

So finally, I selected a very high-powered laptop that was custom made for me by Alienware and it has already been delivered! Here are the specs:

Processor13th Gen Intel Core i9 13900HX (24 Core, 36MB Cache, up to 5.4 GHz).
GraphicsNVidia GeForce RTX 4090 16GB GDDR6 GPU
RAM64GB (2x 32GB) DDR5 4800 MHz
HDD2TB 2x1TB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD
Display18″ QHD (2560 x 1600) 165Hz DCI-P3
KeyboardAlienware CherryMX Ultra-Low-profile mechanical keyboard

Suffice it to say, I am very excited to test out the capabilities of this monster! I have already done some testing with some of my favorite games and even completed a stream on Twitch with it. It has had no issues at all with what I have thrown at it.

If you would like to watch the stream where I unbox the laptop and share the story that got me here, please check out the YouTube video below!

Apple Supercomputer

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The first Apple product I purchased was an iPod Nano back when they were relatively new but I eventually ran out of space on it to store my massive MP3 library. Then, I purchased an iPod classic which I never fully filled up but lasted me for some time. By this point I had already invested quite a bit of money in iTunes, something that was uniquely Apple.

I purchased an iPad2 (Wi-Fi only) for my wife to use as she was zooming about town taking our kids to doctors. When I started my music career, it became apparent that the MacBook Pro and Apple’s Logic Studio would be the best items for me to use for production so I bought a used (and heavily modified) MacBook Pro from a college student. I used the laptop only for my music production and a few other basic operations because I felt that “Mac could not do what Windows does.” However, I was impressed enough by my wife’s iPad that I purchased an iPad3 with LTE…wow… how did I live without this? In fact, when I dropped the iPad and busted the screen I was so distraught at how much time and work I had invested in my apps and notes on this device that I purchased a NEW one that day.

By now, I have a substantial music library with a large part of the songs being iTunes only. I discovered the wealth of movies that you simply can’t get on NetFlix and noticed a markedly higher-quality video from the iTunes rentals over NetFlix. I started using my MacBook for daily operations that I normally thought were only Windows-capable things (i.e. writing documents, printing resumes, etc.) . I even figured out how to make the thing play WoW and The Sims 3. There are very few things that I CAN’T do with a Mac so now you will understand the title of this post. I have purchased a BRAND NEW iMac.

This ain’t your momma’s iMac! It has a beastly 7 core processor, 32GB of RAM, a video card that smokes almost any video card I have used before, 3TB of hard drive space, even a 27″ monitor. Yes, it cost a lot more than a basic PC would cost with a similar hardware base but after seeing the punishment I could put my modded MacBook through with it’s 8 year old hardware (you read that right) I am certain this thing will blow my PC’s away. I almost jumped for the new Mac Pro (aka the trashcan computer) but considering it is totally new and therefore may have bugs combined with the fact that it won’t even ship until at least March, the iMac was the best choice.

My plan now is to transfer all of my old data from my MacBook pro to the new computer once it arrives. I will then wipe the MacBook and reload it so that my wife can use it. Why? Because she is already a rabid iPhone user (I have still kept my trusty Android phones), wants a computer that doesn’t need to be fooled around with to make it work, and something that is as easy to use as her iPhone. Ding ding ding! The MacBook makes perfect sense. I have already seen her delight in amazement at how quickly she could edit photos on the Mac and upload them directly from iPhoto to our Flickr account (something that no Windows computer even comes close to) and how quickly she figured out how to use the Command+menu keys while working on the MacBook.

The computer I will soon have is unlike anything I have ever used before. It may be so good that I completely abandon my Windows computers in the future. No, I am not going to be some snobby hipster who says that I can only use Mac or the world will end. Not at all! There are lots of things that Windows computers can be used for – mostly business applications – and I will still use those at my day job. I will just focus on using this spiffy and super-powered iMac to do my bidding when I am off the clock.

New Gear Heading My Way

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Most IT guys, regardless of the field where they work, are somewhat geeky about gadgets, computers, and general technology. I am no different! Since I began my new Master’s program at UMUC, I have been turning the idea of purchasing a new laptop over and over in my head since my student loans were approved. Finally I made my decision.

I have an aging HP laptop that I purchased in 2008 when I started my M. Div and although it has served me well, it is starting to wear on me. The original build was designed to be Windows Vista and it is an HP Pavilion DV7 running a dual core Intel Centrino with 4GB or RAM and an nVidia GeForce dedicated video card. It works just fine on Windows Vista and I added an additional 2GB to bump it to 6GB of RAM. Once I loaded Windows 7 and updated the nVidia driver to give me the most bang for my buck. However, the dream machine became a nightmare at this point because not only did HP not provide updated features for Windows 7, there was an inherent flaw in the video card driver. If I was using the laptop on its docking station, the video drivers worked just fine but the instant I tried to use the computer off the dock, the screen would black out and then come back, reporting an error with the video card driver kernel and then it recovered from the error. However, I learned quickly that once I saw this event, I had anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes before my computer would completely lock up and require a reboot.

I called HP while on the road in Georgia to and tried to troubleshoot the issue. The technician finally told me that the laptop was designed to work with Vista only and since I was running Win7, HP wouldn’t offer any support. He had me roll back to the basic Windows Vista driver which was the ONLY thing that wouldn’t cause it to choke. That means that since I could never update the video card driver unless I was on a dock (why bother owning a laptop then?) and so my video games have all been using an old antiquated driver for these years. My Sims 3, WoW, and Bastion cannot look as awesome graphically as they are capable of because of the limitations with my hardware. This does not bode well for a man like me with geeky interests!

Last night I finally ordered my new laptop. I labored over the decision for weeks trying to decide how much I wanted to spend, how powerful of a computer I wanted to have, and what vendor to use. I considered the Dell XPS 1720 series but NewEgg has been sold out of them for a week now. I also considered the newest Asus G series laptop but for the cost of the computer and the capabilities, it wasn’t worth it to me. Finally I decided on an Alienware M17 series with an Intel i7 processor (2.o Ghz), 750GB HDD, and AMD Radeon HD video card. The only real downside was that I had not really had much luck with the quality of graphics on ATI/AMD Radeon video cards when they were installed in laptops so I was a little squeamish. However, a NewEgg reviewer posted some of their stats for performance on this machine and I saw what i needed to see. Evidently the Alienware hardware configuration works pretty well when it comes to pure power and graphics boost, the guy is getting over 65 fps on some of the hottest titles out now and his laptop isn’t even batting an eyelash. I purchased an extra 4GB stick or RAM to go with it so I will be running at 12GB when the laptop is fully configured.

I am only a part time gamer but I foresee that I will want to do much more gaming with a rig like this. My old laptop will be re-loaded with WinVista and the latest drivers so I can either use it as a backup for my main rig, or I am thinking of attaching it to my HDTV permanently and buying a new wireless keyboard and mouse so we can have a real media center device for the first time in many years. If we don’t do that, then I will set it up for my wife and then I can take her laptop that she is currently using (slightly older but still has HDMI out) and use it as the media PC. That way I can stream everything from Netflix without having to use the Wii and I can open up the various YouTube videos my daughter likes to dance to without having to struggle with the Wii Remote to type and the painfully slow Opera browser built into the Wii.