Weekend of May 9th, 2008

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Product Spotlight with Chris Graveline

Alienware Area-51 m15x

I’m very fortunate to be able to play around with a lot of cool toys for the show. One of the latest is the Area-51 m15x notebook from Alienware.
Probably one of my favorite things about this notebook is the AlienFX program that lets you customize lighting effects. You could, for instance,
have the logo pulsate. You could make the “light pipe” around the screen change from one color to another and back again. The software even
allows you to have different color schemes depending on which program you have open. I have mine set to change the “light pipe” to red when a
new e-mail comes in, so I can see it from across the room. They have an optional backlit keyboard, although the one we have doesn’t include
that, which I’ve noticed can sometimes make the keys a little hard to see in a dark room.

From a performance standpoint, I was pretty impressed with this machine. It’s running Windows Vista Ultimate on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor
at 2 and a half GHz. It shipped to us with 2 Gig of RAM which I’ll probably upgrade to the 4 Gig max to boost it a little more. But for the video
and audio editing we use it for constantly … it’s got plenty of power. One thing I had to get used to is the lack of buttons. They’ve replaced
them with a set of quick touch sensors that allow you to change volume, turn Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on and off, launch the AlienFX program and
enter “Stealth Mode” which is a low power mode to help with battery life.

Another impressive thing about it is the Smart bay. Right now I have the DVD burner in there, but you could pop it out and replace it with a
second hard drive or an additional battery – which I’d do if I had one. It includes the usual USB, Ethernet and audio connections. This particular
notebook has an HDMI output which makes it possible to connect it to an external High-Definition display with both audio and video on the one cable.

One thing I found to be both good and bad is that it has the newer and faster Firewire 800 port. The good part, as I mentioned is that it’s faster
than the older Firewire 400 port, but the bad part is that the two use different connections, so I have to buy a separate cable in order to connect a
video camera to it before I can do any editing. The bottom line is, it’s a heck of a machine and starting at just under $1500, you can get a good
deal of power. It’s a work horse -- especially on all of our “Into Tomorrow” Remote broadcasts!

--- Submitted by Chris Graveline (in for Rob Almanza)

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