Need Insight from Alienware Owners

You get what you pay for...if you're lucky

I have a fully loaded Aurora m7700, but I can offer an opinion for a couple of your questions...2 GB of RAM is a must for games like BF2 and COD2 in particular.

7200 vs 5400 rpm is the best choice...most of your disk speed comes from rotational delays and not the IDE/SATA interface speed. A question of your patience as gamesw or new levels load...

I like the 1900x1200 screen, and you can scale or center smaller screens...most games only understand up to 1600x1200 anyway, but 1400x1050 is still very playable. Either size with nice eye candy wants a decent GPU like the Go 7800 GTX anyway.

But the "small" price bumps for the disk speed and RAM are well worth it.
Okay, I got the FX-60, so my price perspective is obviously distorted...

Hey toolbox I'm selling my m5500 and its only 2 months old for around $1850. Its in perfect condition. The specs and pics are in my sig. Let me know if you are interested. It is a great laptop, I just need the money now.

Toolbox: In general use you will not notice a big difference in 7200 vs 5400 rpm drives, slight battery usage though. I have a 100hb 7200 rpm drive and a 160gb 5400 drive and really can not tell the difference when i changed them out in speed. Makes fractional difference in boot times etc. I thnik the difference can be seen more on desktops than laptops.

Here's my take on your questions after owning the m5500 for 2+ months and putting it through its paces:

2.0 GHz for the CPU is a solid choice - you could probably go lower and still get great performance, but I think this is a good price/performance ratio.

I highly recommend AGAINST the UXGA screen - the SXGA (1680x1050) is very nice and lets you do everything you need to wrt photoshop, some games, and opening multiple windows. I think 1920x1200 is just too much for a 15.4" screen. Some people may have a real need for the higher res - if you don't, stick with SXGA. (I suggested this to the guy above, but he wouldn't listen )

2GB of RAM will definitely help in gaming. To save a few bucks, you can order the minimum from AW and order your RAM from somewhere like Newegg - good service, good prices. And, relatively easy to install (I did it, and I'm no mechanical genius).

You didn't mention the graphics card - I have the 256MB go6600 and it's fine for my use - but I'd opt for the x1600 ATI card if I were ordering now (it wasn't available when I got mine). I don't play WoW, but do play Guild Wars and I play it at max resolution with most other settings on medium - high and consistently get 45-60 FPS.

If you can swing it, I'd definitely go with the 160GB 5400 RPM drive - the larger 5400 RPM drives show a negligible difference (I can't really tell any diff from my previous notebook with an 80 GB 7200 drive - except double the storage).

Get at least a one year warranty - more if you are the type who keeps your computers for a long time.

And, lastly - and most important - I'd suggest you opt for the xeno gray colour! (okay j/k here - but it actually is a very nice color. Amazing that it shows no dirt/finger prints and is a very durable color - and I think it looks good too.

Sign me, another very happy m5500 owner

RAM
- 2 gigs of ram doesn't realy make a big difference. The only time you see it really effecting things is 3d rendering.

Than again, if an extra gig is worth:
+the much higher heat
+lowered battery life
+extra 200 bucks
than nobody is gonna stop ya.

(Your looking at 1-2% for most games, and 10% if your cpu/videocard are 2 generations old with BF2 ... bf2 being the god of memory leaks anyways)

Monitor
-Also, I personally reccommend 1280x800 or 1680x1050 as a screen resolution. Your monitor is only gonna be 15.4 and super high resolutions end up being bad for gaming as your not going to be running games at 1920x1200 and if you set the resolution to something lower it'll look like blurry garbage.
(LCD's don't like being outa native resolution, and the guy reccomending 1920x1200 has a larger monitor than you)


HDD
-Even at 5400 RPM, an 80 gig hdd will be faster than a 7200 at like 20 gigs because the pin, or whatever has a lwoer distance to move. Atleast taht is what I've read.

Honestly though, whatever you choose wont' hurt performance, and the difference in loading times will probably be liek 10 seconds for most stuff.

Video Card
-Grab best available, nothing else will do. There is no 2 ways about this.

AKA
I recomend:
-2ghz processor
-best possible video card (research this)
-either of the 80 gig hard drives
-1280x800 monitor, provided the display quality of the model is good. (someone else will have to comment) or the 1680x1050 if you crave high resolution.

BF2 is nigth and day difference between 1gb and 2 gb of ram...

And, I also saw quite a difference with COD2 and Oblivion.

I think you will be better off with the m5500 and the x1600 with the sxga screen. (Nothing against the 17 incher - but if you don't really need the extra screen size - than you get good performance with the 5500 and it's a bit more mobile). A 1920x1200 display takes more graphics oomph to run games, so you probably wouldn't see that much more from the go6800 card

Follow CyberP's rule....... Buy as much horse-power as you can afford comfortably, and you will not regret it. Because there is always something that will require it down the road. Don't split tech-spec hairs, blast it with the finances that you can muster.

The 17" m5700 comes with a 6800go video card which is more powerful than the options in the 5500.

No it doesn't. Alienware has an open case warranty, which means you can upgrade drives and memory without voiding your warranty. I think I read the other string you're talking about, and I'm not sure what happened in that case, but you can upgrade some parts and not void the warranty. Alienware won't offer support on parts you buy from other vendors.

You can buy upgrades from Alienware for life. They sell upgrades to existing customers at "vendor" cost which is in most cases like 10% off retail or gear shop pricing. If you're under warranty, Alienware will do the upgrades for you at their depot, all you pay is vendor cost for hardware, and possibly shipping one way. They do the labor no charge, and run it in and return it in factory condition.

Out of warranty they'll still do the upgrade, but you pay shipping, labor, and vendor costs of the hardware.