The first thing that would pop out in my mind when I heard this stuff is that "the best-known for expensive and highly recommended accessories, high-performance PCs, and delivers a good gaming laptop at a reasonable price. There is no such “cheap” thing in there product because all are designed and produced by the game machine maker that creates the premium packages with premium prices that is exclusively just for Alienware accessory. For an Alienware laptop, the m17 is priced within a reasonable ballpark even while packing 1GB of ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics processing power on board. As a result, this monstrous desktop replacement runs modern games at a respectable clip.The Alienware M17 laptop provides fairly solid audio with its 2.1-speaker configuration. While a little tinny, the two front-firing cones are acceptable enough for cube rocking--and surly looks from neighboring officemates.As a gaming machine, the m17 delivers speed where it counts, but it lags a little in more conventional office-application tests.

The Alienware M17 has a big 17-inch screen. Though it is not as eye-blastingly bright as some normal laptop that I have seen but it also displays a normal desktop and color. Even so, the screen doesn't get the picture quite right at the default settings. Some colors get a little muted and warmer colors get cool. Also, the screen is glossy. That means colors look good when viewing the LCD indoors, but viewing anywhere near daylight will bring a little look fiercely. It also goes without saying that desktop replacement notebook batteries don't last long. In this case, you get just under 2 hours on a charge. That's really not surprising given this laptop's big, gawky, heavy design: It weighs a full 9.5 pounds and measures 15.6 by 11.7 by 2 inches.

The biggest beef in the Alienware is with the rubberized wrist rest. Or maybe I should say, "wrist landing pad." Its so huge, you coul park a can of coke on it without fear of hitting as you type. Seriously, it feels like an unnecessarily large gap between the keys and the edge of the notebook. I do like the touchpad and its long, thick mouse button bar, but trying to go back and forth between that and the keys forced my hands into an awkward angle. So make sure you've got good carpal tunnel coverage on your medical plan before buying this laptop (or get an external mouse).

The freezing happens every time my antivirus scans the rootkit. Nothing else has caused it. The freezing didn't happen before I reformatted and reinstalled, but I can't remember if I enabled rootkit scanning so I'm unsure whether it's a bad sector on my HD or corrupted data. Freezing never happens with anything else though so if it is a bad sector then it doesn't contain crucial system data.