Review: Alienware Area-51 m5700 Laptop
By Hahn Choi
February 17, 2006

When you think affordable, Alienware isn't a notebook maker that will register even a small blip on your mental radar. But the Area-51 m5700 bucks the trend with solid features and performance at a competitive price. Don't expect to collect frequent-flyer miles with the m5700 in tow, but if you are looking for media-center features and desktop power in a single laptop, you won't be disappointed.

The m5700 comes with a 17-inch widescreen display that runs natively at 1,440 x 900 pixels. That makes it ideal for watching movies or working on documents side by side. The optional 1,920 x 1,200 display for $250 extra is recommended because there is plenty of real estate in the 17-inch display to handle the higher resolution.

At the time of purchase, you can choose between several Intel Pentium M processors ranging from 1.73 GHz to 2.26 GHz. The machine not only comes with dual-channel DDR2 memory instead of the slower RAM typically found in most notebooks, but also can be configured with two hard drives running either in RAID 0 or RAID 1. Traditionally, notebook storage has been limited to 100 GB, far lower than the storage capacity of desktop PCs. In RAID 0, the m5700 manages an impressive 240 GB of storage.

Weighing in at 8 pounds (depending on the configuration), the m5700 is surprisingly light for a notebook with a footprint of 16 x 11.5 inches. Unfortunately, battery life is the biggest mobility Relevant Products/Services from Avaya-limiting factor. The 1.86-GHz m5700 review unit managed only 2 hours and 25 minutes with Futuremark's MobileMark 2005 productivity test.

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