Hate to admit it, but I didn't actually get an Alienware for gaming. I got it for work. (And if you think it's easy to convince an employer to buy you a computer that comes with a t-shirt professing it as the world's best gaming machine, I have another story for you...)
Among other things, I do writing at work, as well as design and fabrication of scientific instruments. When it came time to buy a new machine, I knew I wanted something with a nice keyboard, a screamin' CPU, a fast FSB, lots of memory, a fast disk (more important to me than size) and was something that I could drag into a machine shop so I could make changes to drawings as I went. I settled on the Area 51m.
How happy I was when the scary black box finally arrived. The machine ran great from the get-go, and in a couple of hours I had the bulk of my software installed and running.
The keyboard is kind enough that I've typed hundreds of pages of documentation without busting a knuckle. My one gripe about typing on the thing isn't even a keyboard issue: It's the tap functionality on the touchpad. I didn't have the touchpad drivers installed on mine out of the box, but tracking down the appropriate drivers so I could turn off the tap function was a matter of a few minutes. Minor annoyance. When I'm at a desk I use a mouse anyway. When I'm not, it's nice not to have it randomly selecting blocks of text because my thumb's in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The display is second only to the big 21" LCD I've got on my desk. But I can do CAD work just as easily on the laptop's screen as I can on the bigger monitor. Seriously big thumbs-up on this.
For some reason I can't get the touchpad's scroll functionality to work with my CAD package. Normally that controls zoom (something you do a lot of when doing CAD work). An external mouse fixes this, but it does mean that doing CAD work without it is a bit of a pain. Minor annoyance, and is probably something on my end that needs fixing rather than a feature of the laptop itself.
The speed of the machine is great. Even when doing nasty 3D contoured toolpaths, it just chugs right along through them. It's funny to hear the cooling throttle up and down while doing CAM work, though. If I start generating a toolpath for a 3D object, a couple of seconds later the fans whine up to speed. At that point I can pretty much start reading mail, surfing the web, whatever. When the whine slows down I know the toolpath generation is finished and I can get back to work. Feature? Sure. I'll take it as that. For me, anyway.
I sprang for the smaller disk to get the higher transfer rates. I can't compare it to the larger disk since I don't have one. But as far as I can tell this thing is nice. Since most of my files live on a file server, I haven't come close to filling this thing up. But when I've got a file in use it's on local disk and just flies.
One other point I'd like to make in favor of the laptop: One of the sites I work at is at 14,000' ASL altitude. A number of people have had problems with laptop batteries keeling over because of altitude issues (you got half the air, so there's half the cooling with a fan, for starters). This was one of the biggest stumbling blocks I had in trying to convince the Powers That Be to get me this thing. Turns out the laptop behaves beautifully at altitude. The CPU throttles back if it starts to overheat, so you don't suffer absolute shutdown. Things just go a little slower. The batteries haven't given me any problems, though I don't run on battery power a lot when I'm up there. It's been a solid performer.
All in all I'm very pleased with my baby. The only real problem I've had is that I busted the PCMCIA bay door. My bad. Alienware replaced it, and I'm back up and running in fine form. I've learned to be gentle when inserting cards.
A quick note to any zealots who are reading this: No, an Apple G4 notebook wasn't an option. Nor was a Linux laptop. Next time you've got an hour to kill, try searching on OS X and Linux CAD/CAM software. The list is incredibly short. A market waiting to be exploited? Possibly. But I think it would be tough to make much headway in it. Don't get me wrong. The G4 is a solid machine, and I was a UNIX admin for twelve years. But one size does not fit all. My Alienware Area 51m, however, fits me to a T.
-- Twitch
Among other things, I do writing at work, as well as design and fabrication of scientific instruments. When it came time to buy a new machine, I knew I wanted something with a nice keyboard, a screamin' CPU, a fast FSB, lots of memory, a fast disk (more important to me than size) and was something that I could drag into a machine shop so I could make changes to drawings as I went. I settled on the Area 51m.
How happy I was when the scary black box finally arrived. The machine ran great from the get-go, and in a couple of hours I had the bulk of my software installed and running.
The keyboard is kind enough that I've typed hundreds of pages of documentation without busting a knuckle. My one gripe about typing on the thing isn't even a keyboard issue: It's the tap functionality on the touchpad. I didn't have the touchpad drivers installed on mine out of the box, but tracking down the appropriate drivers so I could turn off the tap function was a matter of a few minutes. Minor annoyance. When I'm at a desk I use a mouse anyway. When I'm not, it's nice not to have it randomly selecting blocks of text because my thumb's in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The display is second only to the big 21" LCD I've got on my desk. But I can do CAD work just as easily on the laptop's screen as I can on the bigger monitor. Seriously big thumbs-up on this.
For some reason I can't get the touchpad's scroll functionality to work with my CAD package. Normally that controls zoom (something you do a lot of when doing CAD work). An external mouse fixes this, but it does mean that doing CAD work without it is a bit of a pain. Minor annoyance, and is probably something on my end that needs fixing rather than a feature of the laptop itself.
The speed of the machine is great. Even when doing nasty 3D contoured toolpaths, it just chugs right along through them. It's funny to hear the cooling throttle up and down while doing CAM work, though. If I start generating a toolpath for a 3D object, a couple of seconds later the fans whine up to speed. At that point I can pretty much start reading mail, surfing the web, whatever. When the whine slows down I know the toolpath generation is finished and I can get back to work. Feature? Sure. I'll take it as that. For me, anyway.
I sprang for the smaller disk to get the higher transfer rates. I can't compare it to the larger disk since I don't have one. But as far as I can tell this thing is nice. Since most of my files live on a file server, I haven't come close to filling this thing up. But when I've got a file in use it's on local disk and just flies.
One other point I'd like to make in favor of the laptop: One of the sites I work at is at 14,000' ASL altitude. A number of people have had problems with laptop batteries keeling over because of altitude issues (you got half the air, so there's half the cooling with a fan, for starters). This was one of the biggest stumbling blocks I had in trying to convince the Powers That Be to get me this thing. Turns out the laptop behaves beautifully at altitude. The CPU throttles back if it starts to overheat, so you don't suffer absolute shutdown. Things just go a little slower. The batteries haven't given me any problems, though I don't run on battery power a lot when I'm up there. It's been a solid performer.
All in all I'm very pleased with my baby. The only real problem I've had is that I busted the PCMCIA bay door. My bad. Alienware replaced it, and I'm back up and running in fine form. I've learned to be gentle when inserting cards.
A quick note to any zealots who are reading this: No, an Apple G4 notebook wasn't an option. Nor was a Linux laptop. Next time you've got an hour to kill, try searching on OS X and Linux CAD/CAM software. The list is incredibly short. A market waiting to be exploited? Possibly. But I think it would be tough to make much headway in it. Don't get me wrong. The G4 is a solid machine, and I was a UNIX admin for twelve years. But one size does not fit all. My Alienware Area 51m, however, fits me to a T.
-- Twitch
