If you want to have the coolest laptop on campus, there’s no doubt in my mind that the one to have is the Alienware Area 51 Sentia. Ranging in price from overpriced to absurd, the 5.5 lb laptops have a 14″ sxga+ screen, 256-1024 megs of RAM, 40-80 gig hard-drives and run Windows XP Home or Pro on Centrino chips between 1.3 and 1.7 GHz. While the specs may not seem all that different than what’s available for the Dell 600m I reviewed, Alien has a reputation for making computers with top-notch performance, especially for gaming (and graphics intensive molecular modelling software, if you need to justify it for school). While I wonder if the Centrino chips they’re running live up to Alien’s perfomance reputation, I quickly forget those doubts when I see the Alien Blood Green (my name, not their’s) color and the glowing eyes of the little alien head on the lid, sure to strike fear in the hearts of your opponents in the coffee-shop WLAN party…
Hardware Beyond the Hype