Alienware Laptop?!

[gsjohn]

I just saw the website for the Alienware laptop. Besides the astronomical price and the blinding colors, one thing that caught my interest was this claim:

"The Area-51m is not only configurable, but also highly upgradeable. Upgrade your CPU, memory, hard drive, and optical drives anytime after your initial purchase."

CPU? optical drives?

I haven't heard of any laptop manufacturers offer a CPU upgrade. And as far as optical drives, usually the case life of a laptop is 1-2 years max, so even if you could upgrade the optical drives, it usually is limited and very expensive.

So any thoughts on the Alienware laptop? It says its for gaming, but any laptop user would benefit from the nice display and video card this computer has. However, I'm surprised the Pentium 4-m is offered as an extra cost option. Wouldn't a non-mobile Pentium4 be a real bad laptop choice?

[cuffs007]

well... when I think of Alienware... hardcore gaming or need of solid video performance comes to mind... so putting all that (almost) into a laptop makes me think of those folks who have LAN party's and such... much easier to drag a laptop than lug around a complete desktop set-up... and they even mention that in their advertisements...

one little thing I thought was a bit funny was their mentioning taking it right along to business meetings... I can just imagine some guys in their dark business suits, trying to look all stuffy with a big, fat, neon green laptop on the conference room table!... "Uh, Bill, could you please turn DOWN the color of your laptop, please?!"

[gsjohn]

What makes this any better for gaming than an IBM or Dell with a pentium 4-m processor, lots of memory, and a 64MB ATI or Nvidia graphics card? Sounds like a lot to pay for "skilled alienware techicians" to build your system.