My First Complaint About my Alienware 17xR3

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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!

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.