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Alienware Area-51 m15x
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 10th July 2008
Feel and Features
Alienware laptops are...well, the best way to say it is probably the most blunt; they are expensive. You pay a premium for an Alienware laptop and, frankly, we can see why. Not only does the usual driver manual and driver CD come packaged in a nice leather wallet, but there's also a run-down list of the extensive testing done on the notebook before it is shipped out to you. This checklist is personally initialed too, so you can always trace any trouble back to someone.Still, for all the fancy-pants testing and double-checks, an Alienware gaming notebook is just like any other machine in many regards and needs to have decent inputs and build quality if it wants to catch your eye.
It’s a good thing then that the keyboard for the m15x is pretty damn good. It fills out the shape nicely and feels even and solid to use – though the space bar is perhaps a bit too narrow for our liking. After all, there's a good inch of space either side of the keyboard it could spread into.
Like a beer-swilling football fan singing songs in the pub though, the keyboard on the m15x doesn’t stand alone. It’s nicely complemented by a touch-sensitive set of buttons above it, including a volume slider, power button and profile button. These buttons aren’t all as awesomely easy and sensitive as you might hope – the volume slider in particular is more egregious than iPhone, in fact – but they are usable.
The profile key is something that warrants explaining a bit more too, as the Alienware has an awful lot of lights on it, all of which can be tweaked and fiddled with using a provided app. Pressing the Profile key, which looks like a little flying saucer/spinning hubcab, summons this app.
Using this program you can set different profiles and combinations of lights for the m15x, adding together different colours as you wish. You can have them all the same, or all different or whatever you want – and there’s a lot of lights to fiddle with. There’s the keyboard, touchpad, lid and even a little rim light that runs around the screen.
Admittedly, this isn’t a killer feature (unless you listen to Harry, who loves that he can have a laptop more multicoloured than the coat of my biblical namesake), but it is pretty cool nonetheless. Being able to tweak the colours and disco lights around the frame of your laptop doesn’t have any technical worth or benefit – but bling is often appreciated. When gaming you could colour co-ordinate to your home country, your clan tag or even your T-shirt with pizza stains if you want.
Unfortunately, moving away from the keyboard the news gets a little less good. The touchpad especially is pretty annoying in that it sits level with the chassis and doesn’t have any tactile difference. It’s quite slippery and, when you add in the two-buttons below which are moulded to look like a single button, it can be a bit fiddly to use.
On top of that, the fact that it doesn’t have a section of the pad reserved for scrolling with means that it’s unsuited to things like web browsing.
In terms of extras, the m15x is nicely kitted out though and it’s clear that Alienware takes it’s image seriously. The Area-51 m15x arrives in a huge branded box and the laptop itself is kept in a plush, skin-tight sleeve that offers no real protection, but does feel pleasantly luxurious.
Elsewhere, the Area-51 m15x comes with what could probably be considered the standard Alienware options – a branded leather wallet holding drivers and user information, as well as some bundled software. In this case that software was Nero 7 Essentials, though there is some more stuff and special bespoke software pre-installed for doing stuff like restoring your system and changing the lighting scheme.
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