BIOS: Technology Means Business

Alienware's pricey Area-51m 7700 is a highly expandable desktop replacement laptop with some nice entertainment options, such a 17-inch widescreen display and dedicated CD playback controls. It includes pretty much every feature you could possibly want from a laptop, but it is big and heavy and its gaming performance is lacking. Desktop replacement shoppers with an otherworldly sense of humour may want to take a closer look, but gamers, frequent travellers and bargain hunters should look elsewhere.

Pros: 17in. screen; four speakers; two optical drives; raft of I/O ports
Cons: Pricey; big and bulky; no VGA port; noisy; sub-par gaming

Alienware is a niche manufacturer of high-performance desktops, laptops, and media centre computers. Not exactly your run-of-the-mill beige box-shifter, Alienware offers unique products that incorporate state-of-the-art components, innovative engineering, and extreme styling. Having said that, the Area-51m 7700 is a slight exception - its appearance is more boxy than trendy, its keyboard and trackpad are mediocre, and its performance is lacking considering its high asking price. It's also noisy when running, which will turn off movie buffs.

The Area-51m 7700 mobile desktop is armed with the latest technology and hardware available, and is designed to give you the best of both worlds. The flexibility of a laptop is blended into a traditional desktop replacement system, with its only outlandish design feature being the funky backlit alien logo on the top of the lid. We'd never thought we'd ever say it, but even Dell has managed to make more effort in terms of styling with its excellent Inspiron XPS Gen 2 (from £845 ex. VAT).

The Area-51m 7700 is a large laptop (396x297x297mm, 5.4kg), even for a desktop replacement. The principal reason for this is because it accommodates a 17-inch WideXGA+ (1400x900 pixels) or WideSXGA+ (1680x1050 pixels) LCD panel. The system also integrates a raft of high-end multimedia features, including an Intel Pentium 4 processor (630 reviewed here), 1GB of 533MHz DDR2 memory (upgradable to 4GB), 80GB RAID 0/1-enabled hard disk drive (optional 100GB drive), nVidia GeForce Go 6800 graphics chipset with 256MB of dedicated memory (ATI Mobility Radeon X800 is optional), and a single-layer 8x DVD combo drive (there's even room for a second optical drive).

Other features include built-in as standard include 802.11b/g and Bluetooth wireless support, a full-size keyboard with separate numerical pad, and four built-in speakers with a subwoofer (SRS WOW wupport). Intel's High-Definition Audio (24-bit, 192KHz) with 7.1 surround sound is also included, as well as a V.92 modem, Gigabit Ethernet NIC, and a Web camera built into the laptop's lid.

All the connections you could possibly need to attach almost every kind of peripheral are also present, including two FireWire ports, a DVI port for digital monitors, both S-Video-out and S-Video-in ports, composite video-out, S/PDIF port, Type II PC Card slot, and four USB 2.0 ports. Serial and parallel ports, a PS/2 port, and an add-on USB floppy drive give older peripherals a place to dock. There is no built-in VGA connection, but the box includes a short DVI-to-VGA adapter cable. The system comes pre-installed with Microsoft's Windows XP Home Edition operating system.

In addition to its raft of connectivity options, the Area-51m 7700 has two more distinctive features. The systems functions as an excellent stand-alone CD player that can be used without booting Windows - thanks to its separate power button, front panel controls and LCD panel. The controls even include a shuffle button, an unusual extra we've not seen on any other laptops. Unfortunately, you still have boot the laptop to watch DVDs. It would have been great if Alienware had included a Window-less DVD application to make the Area-51m 7700 a complete stand-alone entertainment unit.

The laptop's built-in Web camera is a neat touch, but it's difficult to use due to the lack of a swivel lens and a shutter button. You also have to move the laptop's lid forward and backwards to get your head in the shot because there's no tilt option. Image quality was very good, however, producing smooth and crisp video - particularly when using Instant Messaging (IM) applications.

The Area-51m 7700 certainly delivers in terms of features, but how does it perform? Well, it's certainly a powerful machine that should be capable of handling your processing needs, but its gaming prowess left us disappointed and fell well short of Dell's Inspiron XPS Gen 2. With Alienware's heritage in gaming, this was a real shocker. Operating time wasn't worth shouting about either, and we only managed to get around 1h 15m use from the 12-cell (6600mAH) battery - way behind the average laptop which endures for around 3 hours on one charge. [7]

About our tests:
BIOS uses Futuremark's MobileMark 2002 benchmarking application to test the overall performance and battery life of laptops running Windows XP and Windows 2000. The primary purpose of this benchmark is to measure how long a mobile computer can run on a single battery charge. What makes MobileMark2002 unique is that it measures system performance while the battery is discharging using a number of popular applications (Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Netscape Communicator 6.0, WinZip Computing WinZip 8.0, McAfee VirusScan 5.13, Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1 and Macromedia Flash 5.0). PCMark05 Pro is Futuremark's application-based benchmark for measuring component-level performance. It uses portions of real applications instead of including very large applications or using specifically created code. Futuremark's 3DMark2001 SE runs game tests to provide an accurate overview of a system's gaming performance. In all benchmarks, the higher the score, the faster the computer. We test all laptops at their default settings.