Alienware Area-51 M9750

So a few months ago, Arsgeek called me up and said “Hey, want a new laptop?” Well, of course I do! The only catch was, I had to give it back after a month of use. “So let me get this straight,” I said ”I get to use an for a month, and all I have to do is write a crummy review for your website? Count me in!.” Of course, that was several months ago, and here I sit, no article written yet. Ahhh, the life of a family man, no time for fun stuff!

Back on track here, I got to spend 30 or so quality days 2GB RAM, dual SLI Nvidia 8700M GT video cards, Intel Core 2 Duo T7600, yadda yadda yadda. Oh yeah, and weight of about 42 stone. Or seemingly so. It’s actually 9lbs 8 oz. or so with the battery, but felt like I was lifting a two ton heavy thing.

This isn’t so much of a tech-review per-se. You can get that data at numerous other sites on the internet. I’m going to focus more on the usability aspects of the machine, how it feels, how the features work, and overall impressions.


I got this sucker home after picking it up at Arsgeek’s place. Of course, the huge box it came in barely fit in my car (Yes, I know, Miata’s are small). It wouldn’t fit in the trunk, so it got the passenger seat. Just barely. Pulling it out of the box, I was struck by how huge this notebook is. And the weight. This isn’t so much of a ‘notebook’ as a ‘portable desktop’ machine. The power brick is just that – larger than a brick and heavier too, I’d imagine. Alienware must have needed all the space and weight to cram in the performance and features they did into this machine.

Sitting down into my comfy chair, I opened the machine and powered it on. Then it hit me. No, not the notebook – I got ‘the stare’ from my wife. This isn’t just heavy and large, it’s also fairly loud, with two fans immediately coming on, causing my wife to turn the TV up a bit. Of course, the situation lightened up a bit when my daughter walked over, pointed to the back of the laptop, and said ‘EYES!!’. It turns out that on the back of the LCD cover there is a little alien head, and the eyes glow blue. Neat effect, actually. My daughter really got a kick out of it.
 The SLI video card performed admirably. I ran some 3dMark06 benchmarks on the system. With the default drivers from Alienware installed, it ran a respectable 7781. Some tweaking, and an updated driver later, I coaxed a score of 8068 out of the machine. Pretty impressive, actually.

I tend to use my laptops as just that – laptops. I don’t have a desk that I put the machine one. I keep them standing on edge next to my chair, and when I want to use it, I reach down, lift it up into my lap, open the lid and go to town. This works great with my current machine, a Lenovo T60p. With the Alienware, however, this did not work too well – the machine is just too heavy and unwieldy to do this maneuver with. The M9750 is really not a laptop (or even a notebook, if you are into semantics) in any sense of the word, it’s a desktop replacement. Period. I do have to say that heat efficiency is pretty good on the M9750 – it only gets about as warm as my T60p, even though it has two graphics cards and two hard drives in it.

HP Vivienne Tam

New York City fashion week may be a strange place to debut the average new laptop, but it's very fitting for HP's Vivienne Tam Special Edition machine. She was approached by HP to design them a new laptop, and she came up with something that's apparently a "true reflection of the needs of a modern woman who cares about fashion but is also passionate about her technology." Updated: More data has emerged on the machine  

To that end, it has a complimentary embroidered case/sleeve and is approximately clutch purse-sized... with what could be a 10-inch widescreen. It looks like a UMPC-style notebook, but there's just no word at all on the specs of the device. And that's something that'd amuse and annoy many modern tech-passionate women I know. It'll be out in October, price still to be announced hey've had a very short—restricted by a secretive HP—hands-on with the special notebook. HP is apparently labeling it a "Digital Clutch”-style product, but has declined to mention the device's name. It resembles the HP 2133 Mini-Note except that, as suspected, it has a 10-inch screen versus the 2133's 8.9-inches. The keyboard also appeared the same as the 92% Mini-Notes, as did the position of the trackpad and mouse keys.

MSI GX723

MSI have recetly announced GX723 gaming laptop. The MSI GX723 has been designed specifically for gaming. This new laptop sports a 17-inch WXSGA screen. the MSI GX723 gaming laptop comes with an Intel Core Duo processor, a NVIDIA GeForce GT 130M graphics, up to 4GB of RAM, a choice of either a 320GB or 500GB hard drive, a six/nine cell battery and Windows Vista Home Premium OS. The GX723 selects the brand new ECO Engine, the outstanding and unique power saving function by MSI Notebook, as the power management function to extend the battery running time while performing different tasks.  

The ECO quick launch touch sensor can be used to switch between different modes like Gaming mode, Movie mode, Presentation mode, Office mode, and Turbo Drive mode. With new Dolby® Theater Class 5 speakers and exclusive MSI vivid image enhancement technology – the MSI GX723 Laptop can create the most astonishingly realistic audio and visual effects.

This new MSI laptop uses something called as the Turbo Drive Engine Technology which is exclusive to MSI laptops. With this new technology, when the GX723 is in AC mode, just by touching the turbo button above the keyboard, you can simultaneously increase the speed of your CPU, also the computer may run smoother and to the best of its abilities

lenovo e laptop

Lenovo this week has put there newest laptop out on the market and it is impressive. The Lenovo IdeaPad U110 is a sleek new laptop weighing only 2.4 pounds coming in the colors black and red and a cost of $1,899.00. This notebook looks amazing. The ultrasleek notebook comes with a distinct sense of style that is brand new in today's competitive laptop market. The laptop comes great features such as face recognition software, an Active Protection System tht will stop the hard drive in the event of a fall, and a battery management software to improve battery life.
The laptop screen is very impressive. the 11.1-inch screen comes in a frameless design that you cannot even feel the edges of the screen. The system also uses LED-backlit technology to help save battery life.

The new small sleek light laptops of today make for easy travel. No more need to worry about where to put your bulky laptop, new designs like these are so small you can fit them in any travel bag or brief case.

accer

I love design deeply, whatever new design has came up always took my attention. Great product design almost followed by great sales. Lets mention iPod, the unique design just make the product bloated in the market, as they break 100 million product sold out around the world.

New Acer laptop design concept, Gemstone, really impressing. Coming with rouded and opalesque contours, make the look even aerodynamic and classy. Others keys design achievment is the white keyboard with neon media flow, it’s very sleek elegance.

Acer apply the new design concept to the TravelMate and Aspire series with  but they didn’t tell much about the technical specification yet, but soon they will be out. Now they are just hyping the new Gemstone product design. We don’t know whether the new design will take serious affect, just wait and time will tell. What do you think?

Sony VGNAR51E

I was very impressed at how well Ubuntu 7.10 runs on the laptop. The webcam, memory card reader, headphone jack and hibernation doesn’t work but the wireless, battery indicator and everything else works fine. One of the reasons for getting my instead of a normal mobile phone was so I could write my journal whilst on the coach to work. But the keyboard that comes with it turned out to be inadequate. So I got a replacement:Make sure your Ameo is attached to your Windows PC and that ActiveSync is running. When you double-click “WM05SP.exe” it will install a progrm in C:\Program Files\Freedom Universal Keyboard. The install.bat file in this program didn’t work for me so I manually moved “bthkeyb.ARM.CAB” (a file that was included in the install) onto the Ameo via ActiveSync and installed the CAB directly from the Ameo.
After installation, a new icon will have appeared in “Programs” called “Bthkeyb”. The first time you click it, you will be given a “Device Code” and asked for a passcode The keyboard program shows a almost blank info screen except the bottom-right corner has a button labled “Main”. Select “Main”, then choose “General”.
On the keyboard, move the switch to “HID mode” so the LED flashes green, then press and hold the “B” button. On the Ameo, click the “Bluetooth keyboard” checkbox.
The connection is automatically made in a few seconds and a message “Keyboard was connected” pops up – it’s then safe to release the “B” button. Test the keyboard works in MS Word Mobile.

EeePc900

This laptop can be summed up in one word: “Cute”. It’s just perfect for traveling:

9 inch screen
Weights only 1KG
Solid-state disk drive (very bump/knock resistant)
Wi-Fi
Built in camera for Skyping
Card Reader so you can store holiday snaps.


I bought this laptop for two reasons, firstly to help plan our road trip as we went and secondly so I could write a journal without doing it on paper then spending ages typing it up like I did when we went to Europe. It worked very well for both these requirements and it also kept us entertained. One evening we watched a episode of TrueBlood in our tent whilst in quite a scary campsite in Canyon Du Chelly (with lots of stray dogs)! However, it definitely lacked performance. It was slow to boot into XP and felt sluggish to use, for example menus would have a delay before popping up and it couldn’t handle viewing photos from our camera at all quickly. Putting Linux on it might have improved it a lot but not enough for me to be impressed. I did want the 901 model (which has a 1.6GHz CPU instead of this 900MHz) but it wasn’t in any of the US shops (and we looked all round Los Angeles).

What did this laptop cost? We bought it in “BestBuy” for $500 (£270) including tax and we sold it on Ebay 7 weeks later for £180 but we had Ebay fees of £16.33 (listing: £1.79, postage: £8.22, PayPal: £6.32) so the end result is that we rented this for the US trip for £106. It was worth every penny considering how convenient it was for planning our trip and for how much time and money we would have spent in Internet cafes if we didn’t have it.