My New Laptop

After more than three years wielding my trusty Dell XPS M1210, I felt it was time to upgrade to a Dell Alienware M15x. This is also a history of the laptops I used during the last three and a half years.

• Three and a half years ago I bought a Dell XPS M1210 with an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU @ 1.86 GHz, 2 GB of memory, and a 120 GB 5400 RPM hard drive. This laptop has a 12.1” display.
• Two years ago I bought an Asus Eee 900 with an Intel Celeron processor at @ 900 MHz, 1 GB of RAM, and the slowest 16 GB SSD one could envision (the system never got a WEI because the disk assessment would time out). This laptop has a 9” display.
• A year and a half ago I bought a Dell Latitude XT with a multitouch display (the primary reason why I needed it at the time was for the Windows 7 Training Kit development), as well as an Intel Core 2 Duo ULV CPU, 3 GB of memory, and a 120 GB 5400 RPM hard drive. This laptop has a 12.1” display.
• Less than a year ago I received an Acer Aspire 1420P laptop with an Intel Celeron dual-core U2300 CPU @ 1.2 GHz, 2 GB of RAM, and a 250 GB hard drive. This laptop has an 11.6” display.

The laptop I bought this time is meant to serve me for at least two years. I was having a difficult time choosing between the Alienware M11x, which is the tiniest gaming laptop and closer to my usual comfort range in display sizes, and the Sony Vaio Z which a beautiful machine. I decided to compromise and go for the 15” display but pack the machine full of the best parts available.

The final spec is this:

• Intel Core i7 940XM @ 2.13 GHz (3.33 GHz Turbo Mode)
• 8 GB DDR3 memory
• 15.6” wide 1920x1080 display
• ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5850 (1 GB memory)
• 256 GB Samsung PM800 SSD
• Intel WiFi Link 5300 802.11 AGN card

Admittedly, I haven’t done the final driver tuning yet (I was too busy using this amazing machine, finally being able to demo truly parallel applications from the convenience of my laptop), but at this time I have a WEI of 7.1, with the graphics adapter being the weakest link:

So far, the weight (more than 4kg) hasn’t been a problem for me—I’ve been using my Victorinox backpack into which it fits perfectly.

Battery life isn’t splendid, of course, but there’s not much to be expected from such a beast. I did squeeze more than 2.5 hours from it with WiFi on and without entering Stealth Mode, so it’s not that bad.