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Hey guys,

Have any of you 2 tried out the internal wireless cards yet? I'm curious as to how the range/signal is doing for ya. I come from the Area-51m 766 model.. and some of you guys know the internal wireless issues that laptop had - so I'm a bit skeptical. Anyhow, I didn't order mine with one, but I'd like to know just in case I decide to later down the road.

Great review by the way, very informative. I wish I would have ordered the Alienware Backpack too!

I meant to ask also: how loud are these laptops? Are they going to be a problem in a classroom setting?

I went to bed at 2am and the damn kids woke me up at 6am. Coal in their stockings next Xmas!!!

LOL..oh, ok...I just didn't know the "audio dj" was the name of that built-in functionality. Let me check it out to see if it's working. I had the same thing on my old Sager and I don't think I ever used it. Always had the machine open/running and played tunes off the hard drive.

I'm hesitant to do a bios flash with such a new machine--at least until I feel comfortable with its normal operation. Anyway, I'll let you know if it's working.

Keep cursing at it, or better yet, show it a big ol' hammer.


Yes, that's the first thing I fired up after turning on the computer. My router is in the next room, so my results aren't a very rigorous test, but it's 5 x 5 and unwavering at a short distance (like it should be). It's nice enough outside today (high of near 65 in N. Va! in the middle of January!) that maybe I'll take it outside and test its range. If I do, I'll let you know.

These machines are only loud if you're doing school work. If you are playing games they are super-silent!! Muahahaha...if only that were true. It's early yet, but it's certainly no louder than my older machine. Fans tend to get louder with age as the fan bearing wears, but overall I'd say my new machine is quieter right now than my old one, especially if I'm not stressing the CPU. I wish I had a sound pressure level meter to give you some quantitative measures, but I don't.

I think in a normal classroom with average ambient noise, it won't be a problem. If you're sitting in a very quiet library, then yes, it will be audible. Expect it to get louder the longer you own the rig.

Dang that's awesome. I'm SO going to own one of these as soon as bonus time rolls around next month.

Thanks! Oh...and for a gamer would you recommend the FX-55 or 57 or the 4800?

I'm not the best one to give you gaming advice, but if you're a hard core gamer, ALL you do is game, and you want to squeeze every extra ounce of gaming power out of your chip, then you'll probably want the single core variant. If you need the computer for both gaming and work, then dual core is the way to go. The added flexibility of the dual core chips allows seamless multitasking without much of a gaming performance hit.

4800, but now u can get the fx60 with is best

For pure gaming perfromance, the fx-57 is still awesome. The fx-60 is basically two fx-55 cpu's in one, both cores are clocked at 2.6 ghz. I can only dream of the performance that it would give.

One Question : What do you think the chassis is made from - both screen/lid and base?
I routed through the alienware site but couldn't find a reference to it.

I thought that it may be plastic and that was putting me off, but as you said the build quality was very solid, so im not quite so concerned anymore.

I’ve seen my dads very old AJP plasticy lump of a laptop almost dissolve through use. The screen hinges were horribly creaky and it seems that it was spray painted silver because through years of use the paint wore off on the wrist wrests. He must have acid sweat. I guess I must inherit these alien attributes.

By the way what a great review, I’ve been hanging back waiting to hear how these newies perform. I'm going to get one of these beasts for Architectural work and naturally a game or two.

Looks like I've got the same problem. Can't eject either drive, although I do see the green light on the top drive as if it's trying to access something. Turning on the DJ shows the time counter, so I know it's getting power there, but it just stays at zero. Obviously it's not communicate properly with the drive. I haven't tried the removal/reinsertion yet.

The DJ panel is responsive with the machine powered on, but that doesn't do us much good, eh? I did notice that the stop/eject button will stop the disc, but it won't eject with the computer powered on.

That is the exact problem that I'm having. Mine also doesn't eject the drive when powered on, but not sure if it should. Seems to have to do with having two drives. They told me they knew about the problem and to call them back in 4 to 5 days to see if they have a fix for it. I wouldn't bother with the bios flash or removing the drives, as that doesn't seem to be the problem (at least it didn't fix it). Maybe a newer bios is coming. Oh well, it is still better than I thought it would be.

Ok, thanks for the heads-up. Hopefully they'll get it fixed shortly.

if you guys are still wondering about the issue, hop on over to the Alienware forums on their site, apparently there are quite a few that aren't working as well.

Here's an update of the Aurora's capabilities.

I decided to do my own "stress test" to see how the Aurora would handle multiple tasks. These are the applications I had open simultaneously:

Windows Explorer
Remote Desktop MMC Console (remoted in to my server at work)
Add/Remove Programs
Filezilla FTP
Windows Media Player playing a home video
Free Agent Usenet Newsreader downloading new posts
Adobe Photoshop CS2 with 150 640x480 images open at the same time (I also opened all of them as a single batch, not one by one)
Opera 8.1 browser with 8 tabbed windows open
Macromedia Dreamweaver 8
MS Outlook
Mailwasher Pro 5.0
MS Word
MS Excel
MS Powerpoint
PerfectDisk Defragmenter (two instances defragging both of my partitions)
PowerDVD running a different video than the one Windows Media player was running
America's Army video game
Internet Explorer
Poker Tracker database of over 800,000 hands served from a Postgres 8.0 back end database (hosted locally)
Cold Fusion Server 7
IIS 6.0 w/5 websites running (hosted locally)
Task manager
Si Meter
RivaTuner 2.0
Norton Anti-Virus
Zone Alarm
Mobilemeter

This doesn't even include all of the services that are running in the background. All told, I'm using just about 2GB of RAM for all of this stuff.

Ya know what? This friggin machine didn't miss a beat. I could flip back and forth between any and all windows seamlessly. No hiccups with the videos. I could bring up any of the 150 images loaded into photoshop very quickly. There was no latency or delay with my remote access application managing my server at work. It was as if I was sitting at my server's console. Even America's Army ran seamlessly. I mean, it's just incredible.

This is EXACTLY why I bought the Aurora. So far it has met or exceeded my every expectation.

No pRon?

@ SagerMeister:
Why have you opted for AW instead of Sager ? I'm facing similar dilemma - AW or Sager. Sager is a lot cheaper, but seems have some relaiability problems. Shipping cost of RMA/replacement would kill me...