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It's a Disasta! - A Rant about the Alienware Area-51 m9750 gaming notebook PC
It seems as though I am destined to not play video games or produce decent media. Since I obtained my Alienware Area-51 m9750 notebook PC almost 3 Christmases ago, the road of owning said Alienware, has been a rough one.
After recovering from the shock of recieving the gift, I had to face the facts: The 1gig (2x 512mb) of RAM it sported HAD to be upgraded. The optics drive had no DVD burning option. It was only a CD+RW/DVD+R player. So that too had to be upgraded. The processor IS an Intel core 2 duo, but only a 2.0ghz. So, again, upgrade time. The chasse has two slots for SATA HDDs. In which, only ONE of them actually contained a hard drive. On top of it not even having everything it can handle, it was a whapping 80gig HDD. The video was handled by a 512mb nVidia 8600m. That's good n' all, except it's SUPPOSED to have SLI. Meaning, there are 2 identicle video cards running simultaneously as one. So instead of enjoying crystal clear gaming and video with 1gig of video memory, I am stuck with 512mb and a hole in my motherboard. The sound card gives me HD 7.1 support, but the TV tuner in the back that would NORMALLY give me an extra audio in, s-video in, and coaxial in, instead is just a dead chip sitting idol in the machine. Lots of bogus facts for being an Alienware.
SO, back then, I had a brand-new not-so-state-of-the-art Alienware computer that JUST got released. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't know how many OTHER kids' parents buy them $2,300 gaming laptops for Christmas, but I still feel pretty damn privilaged.
Since I opened the beast, I upgraded the RAM from the two 512mb sticks it had, to two 2gig sticks giving me 4gigs of RAM total. My games ran beatuifully. However, not even 6 months into owning the new chips, one of them failed dropping my rig down to 2gigs. I had misplaced the reciept and packaging along with my old RAM sticks so I'm stuck with 1 working 2gig stick of RAM and 1 broken one. And 2gigs of RAM doesn't run Crysis too well.
My sister's old Dell laptop died too and I salvaged her hard drive out of that and threw it into the empty slot I had remaining. Now, with addition of my sister's whapping 40gig hard drive, I was a proud owner of a wonderful 120gigs of space. Mind you, for less than $200 you can buy 1,000gigs of space online. And most desktop computers can't be bought with anything less than 200-300gigs of space. Just recently, the 80gig Seagate hard drive the Alienware CAME with fried out. So to this day, I have nothing but a big black paper weight.
So, I have a 2-year-old Alienware gaming rig with 80gigs of DEAD hard drive. 40gigs of OLD hard drive. A processor so small they don't even make it anymore. A DVD burner that doesn't fit in the front right, No SLI enambled (which is beyond standard now. Desktops are comming with 3 video cards) giving me only 512mb of video memory. Half my RAM is dead so even IF my hard drive worked, I can't play games. Beautiful.
If I had a million dollars...
I want to replace the RAM with two 4gig sticks. Bringing me up to 8gigs total, games and other programs would have no reason to be slow at all.
The processor would be swapped for at LEAST a 3.0ghz (preferably 3.55ghz) Intel core 2 DUO.
Two 500gig hard drives would take up the slots in the side bringing me from 120gigs of half-dead, half-old space to a beautiful 1,000gigs.
Finally, I would send the thing BACK to Alienware and tell them I want SLI enabled (1gig of video memory) and to activate the TV tuner (so I can utilize the "audio-in" for recording).
RECAP:
After that would be all said and done, here's the machine in a nutshell:
OLD:
RAM: 1x 2gig DDR2
PROCCESSOR: 2.0ghz Intel Core 2 DUO
VIDEO: 1x 512mb nVidia 8600m - SLI disabled
HDD: 120gigs SATA 2x drive configuration - 1x 80gig DEAD, 1x 40gig
NEW:
RAM: 2X 4gig DDR2 (8gigs total)
PROCCESSOR: 3.0ghz Intel Core 2 DUO
VIDEO: 1gig (2x 512mb) nVidia 8600m - SLI enabled
HDD: 1TB (2x 500gig) HDD configuration
OTHER: TV tuner enabled
After recovering from the shock of recieving the gift, I had to face the facts: The 1gig (2x 512mb) of RAM it sported HAD to be upgraded. The optics drive had no DVD burning option. It was only a CD+RW/DVD+R player. So that too had to be upgraded. The processor IS an Intel core 2 duo, but only a 2.0ghz. So, again, upgrade time. The chasse has two slots for SATA HDDs. In which, only ONE of them actually contained a hard drive. On top of it not even having everything it can handle, it was a whapping 80gig HDD. The video was handled by a 512mb nVidia 8600m. That's good n' all, except it's SUPPOSED to have SLI. Meaning, there are 2 identicle video cards running simultaneously as one. So instead of enjoying crystal clear gaming and video with 1gig of video memory, I am stuck with 512mb and a hole in my motherboard. The sound card gives me HD 7.1 support, but the TV tuner in the back that would NORMALLY give me an extra audio in, s-video in, and coaxial in, instead is just a dead chip sitting idol in the machine. Lots of bogus facts for being an Alienware.
SO, back then, I had a brand-new not-so-state-of-the-art Alienware computer that JUST got released. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't know how many OTHER kids' parents buy them $2,300 gaming laptops for Christmas, but I still feel pretty damn privilaged.
Since I opened the beast, I upgraded the RAM from the two 512mb sticks it had, to two 2gig sticks giving me 4gigs of RAM total. My games ran beatuifully. However, not even 6 months into owning the new chips, one of them failed dropping my rig down to 2gigs. I had misplaced the reciept and packaging along with my old RAM sticks so I'm stuck with 1 working 2gig stick of RAM and 1 broken one. And 2gigs of RAM doesn't run Crysis too well.
My sister's old Dell laptop died too and I salvaged her hard drive out of that and threw it into the empty slot I had remaining. Now, with addition of my sister's whapping 40gig hard drive, I was a proud owner of a wonderful 120gigs of space. Mind you, for less than $200 you can buy 1,000gigs of space online. And most desktop computers can't be bought with anything less than 200-300gigs of space. Just recently, the 80gig Seagate hard drive the Alienware CAME with fried out. So to this day, I have nothing but a big black paper weight.
So, I have a 2-year-old Alienware gaming rig with 80gigs of DEAD hard drive. 40gigs of OLD hard drive. A processor so small they don't even make it anymore. A DVD burner that doesn't fit in the front right, No SLI enambled (which is beyond standard now. Desktops are comming with 3 video cards) giving me only 512mb of video memory. Half my RAM is dead so even IF my hard drive worked, I can't play games. Beautiful.
If I had a million dollars...
I want to replace the RAM with two 4gig sticks. Bringing me up to 8gigs total, games and other programs would have no reason to be slow at all.
The processor would be swapped for at LEAST a 3.0ghz (preferably 3.55ghz) Intel core 2 DUO.
Two 500gig hard drives would take up the slots in the side bringing me from 120gigs of half-dead, half-old space to a beautiful 1,000gigs.
Finally, I would send the thing BACK to Alienware and tell them I want SLI enabled (1gig of video memory) and to activate the TV tuner (so I can utilize the "audio-in" for recording).
RECAP:
After that would be all said and done, here's the machine in a nutshell:
OLD:
RAM: 1x 2gig DDR2
PROCCESSOR: 2.0ghz Intel Core 2 DUO
VIDEO: 1x 512mb nVidia 8600m - SLI disabled
HDD: 120gigs SATA 2x drive configuration - 1x 80gig DEAD, 1x 40gig
NEW:
RAM: 2X 4gig DDR2 (8gigs total)
PROCCESSOR: 3.0ghz Intel Core 2 DUO
VIDEO: 1gig (2x 512mb) nVidia 8600m - SLI enabled
HDD: 1TB (2x 500gig) HDD configuration
OTHER: TV tuner enabled
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