Alienware M17X 17.3" Black Laptop

Pros: Cool looking exterior. Top of the line video card.

Cons: Overpriced. Easily overheats. Sub par components. Poorly engineered on the inside.

I have owned four Alienware computers, including three laptops and one desktop computer. I was severely disappointed with all of them. My first two laptops all died within one year. And, my last two were replacement computers given to me by Alienware and lasted no more than two years. They have a bunch of power under the hood and therefore have a short shelf life. Although Alienware computers look really cool on the outside, it's what's on the inside that is horrendous. With exception to the graphics card, the rest of the components are poor quality. And, the engineers at Alienware did a poor job in constructing the computers. Placing the hard drive next to an overheating video card is not smart engineering. Furthermore, screws were missing on the inside and the casing is typically made out of cheap plastic. I highly recommend to stay away from Alienware and consider other high-end gaming computer brands.

I have owned this laptop for about 8 months at this point. Let me tell you that is by far the fastest laptop I have ever used. It handles most games with ease at full graphics.

That being said there is a major flaw with this laptop. Within 2 months of owning the laptop, the keys started popping off. Dell does have a picture tutorial on how to put this keys back on, but if you follow the tutorial it will often lead to adjacent keys popping off. And if you push too hard when trying to get the keys to latch, then you are out of luck. Luckily my first experience with Alienware customer service ended in a keyboard replacement in less than 2 days from calling tech support. However when it started happening again tech support was not that helpful. I was told I would need to purchase a replacement keyboard for $110! The laptop is under warranty for 4 more months. I was even considering extending the warranty.

My suggestion is to use the built in keyboard as little as possible. I use a logitech keyboard now, my biggest issue is now the laptop does not really travel easily anymore.

Buy Alienware M17X 17.3" Black Laptop Now

this is awesome. it doesn't lag at all for FPS games including Modern Warfare 3.

you can play at high performances and still no lag :O

All I have to say is that this is the best gaming laptop I've ever got, the 3d features are also really nice but most games

don't have 3d so i don't recommend 3d. Thanks for reading .

MAKE SURE YOU BUY THIS.

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this computer is awesome for all my games. i can even hook up my xbox 360 and ps3 through the hdmi ports. and i can hook up the computer to the tv through the hdmi port.

Want Alienware M17X 17.3" Black Laptop Discount?

First of all, let me say in plain english, Do Not Buy an M17x or any other Alienware PC.

I remember that once upon a time, dell was a great company. They built quality consoles, they had the warranty that set the industry standard, they cared about their customer support. It is clear to me that these things no longer matter to Dell. A big name and customer loyalty brings us back time after time. Over the past decade, I have given them dozens of referrals and direct purchases, but in the year since I purchased my dell M17x 8GB with dual Nvidia 260M graphics in SLI and an Intel i7 processor, I have actively scuttled just as many purchases by telling all about my personal experience.

Its unstable. Out of the box, brand spanking new, it barely even qualifies as a paper weight. It took me 3 days, and probably 30 hours to get through simply downloading and installing window's updates, firmware mismatches all kinds of errors and stuff that i'll get into later caused me so many problems that its not even funny. If your top of the line(or at least above average) gaming PC can't even run Mcaffee or your own on-board Aliensense programs, then how the hell are you going to run dragon age, fallout, league of legends, even counterstrike or NES Emus?

So, what kinds of problems did I experience? The laptop will power down completely without even attempting to shutdown windows and completely without warning. The screen goes solid white with a streak of random pixels near the bottom. The computer freezes... FREEZES. I haven't seen that since High-school and Pentium 3. and these errors can occur with or without an obnoxiously loud tone blasting me in the face for a minimum of 3 seconds while i try to hard off the PC.

The obvious issues. Well, first of all there was an obvious NVIDIA driver conflict with something on-board. since alien-sense is the only non-standard program that comes pre-installed, i choose to blame that, however it doesn't really matter. after trying 5-6 other Nvidia drivers I find one that doesn't crash my computer every 30 mins like clockwork. Issue two. Poor design. The screen is too far back, the external shell gets too hot, too fast thanks to poor internal cooling, mother-board has no internal sensors on-board, inferior components like the SSD that they charged me to install but has a SLOWER read/write speed than my last HDD. Also the "break me" button at the top right has no tactile response, no toggle and no "oh i didn't mean to break my pc, UNDO" button. see below.

Less obvious problems. the "break me" button also called "stealth mode" instantly insures that you will not have a moment's rest until you figure out what exactly stealth mode is and why you never-ever want to graze that button. Stealth mode is dell's commitment to green in action. when you touch that button, it will instantly shut off all graphics cards except for the one built into the i7(which cant handle much) underclock your CPU, shut down anything that is drawing power from a USB port, kill your wifi, bluetooth, even your keyboard lighting. anything to conserve power, except of course toggle down the brightness on your monitor. you need to use window's settings to do that. and before you ask, no. you can neither disable, nor change the settings of the "break me" button, and no. once "break me" mode is initiated, you can't turn it off. you must unplug the pc, power down the pc restart the pc, go into the Bios for the PC, mess with the settings re-enabling all the stuff that is disabled(like your USB port and hybrid graphics), plug in your pc and restart it. first of all, the creation of such a button on a GAMING PC is just dumb. next everything it does, you can do through settings or by unplugging your externals, windows calls this "power management." third, there is no way to make this setup stable. i need at least one GPU to run windows for more than 5 minutes without it crashing, period. hence the "break me" button.

also if the laptop comes unplugged, perhaps you foolishly wanted to present a project or surf the web while watching TV you must restart your computer in order to re-enable hybrid graphics, i guess the battery just can't provide that much power. I do get an NVIDIA GPU though which is handy if i'm not interested in gaming or doing anything processor intensive. it should be noted that i needed an alienware patch before, under some circumstances, the power supply that came with the PC was recognized as "the proper" power supply. as if i happened to have a compatible low-watt version hanging out at home and i thought "gee, all computer parts are interchangeable" derp.

presently, my alienware pc is more or less stable. but, needless to say, i came very very close to sending it back before everything clicked. i say more or less because it can still glitch out when i push it and every once in a while when i don't. so i say it again. Don't buy an Alienware M17x. I hear good things about ASUS, Lenovo, and even HP if you aren't obsessive about high end graphics.