Digital Trends

Alienware Area-51 m9750

January 2nd, 2008 | by Josh Norem

General usage

Not surprisingly, the m9750 is a veritable dragster in Windows Vista. With its 2GB of RAM, fast processor and dual-GPUs it runs Vista Aero like buttah, which is no surprise. It’s Windows Experience Index score is 4.7, which is impressive for a notebook.

The hard drives are very fast, and allow programs to start instantly. We also liked the touch-sentive media buttons below the LCD. You just graze them with a fingertip to launch Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, etc. Our only gripe is there doesn’t seem to be a way to customize what the buttons do, so for example we could not get the “Internet” button to open Mozilla Firefox rather than Internet Explorer.

There are also the standard Fn keys that turn the Wifi radio on and off, but Alienware added two that we like a lot. One lets you turn off the glowing alien eyes on the lid, and the other lets you disable the touchpad since it can get in the way during gaming. These are nice touches indeed. 

Webcam problems

Now we get to the bad parts. There’s an integrated 1.3MP webcam but we couldn’t get it to work. We were able to use it to capture video but no audio. When we selected the microphone as an active device in the drop-down menu, we got an error message with some funny grammar.

When we tried to enable the onboard microphone we were met with an unintentionally funny error message.

System restore issues

The m9750 includes a hidden partition with an image of the hard drive as it shipped from the factory. Theoretically, you’re supposed to be able to restore the notebook to its factory settings using the included Alien Respawn 2.0 software that you activate during bootup. Unfortunately, we could not get it to work at all. Every time we pressed F10 during bootup to run it, we got a Blue Screen of Death. The BSOD told us to run Chkdsk /f and we did that, but it still would not work.

Every time we tried to run the Alien Respawn system restore we got a BSOD.

So, we had to re-install Vista using the included CD. This left us with Vista installed but no drivers, but thankfully Alienware includes a driver CD that is very easy-to-use and simple. It’s not ideal, however, as restoring using the image on the partition would have already had all the drivers and applications installed.

Alienware provides a very easy-to-use driver and application CD in case your OS gets hosed.

Conclusion

We actually took the m9750 with us to our family’s holiday celebration, and the reaction from our family members was priceless. They couldn’t believe a notebook could be this big and powerful. Everyone was impressed by its looks and its performance, including us. This is a seriously powerful notebook but it does have a few drawbacks. The first is that its cooling fans are almost always on, and they are noticeably loud. The second is the videocards are already a bit dated, though they were able to play Bioshock and CoD4, albeit at a low resolution. If you order an m9750 we highly recommend upgrading to the 8700M for maximum longevity. Third, we had issues with the webcam and system restore, which is disappointing. All-in-all we had a better-than-average experience with the m9750 though, and despite its flaws we would still put it near the top of our list of must-have desktop replacement notebooks.


Pros:

• Great gaming performance
• Lots of storage
• Brilliant display 


Cons:

• GPUs are DX9
• Lots of fan noise
• Wonky webcam and system restore