Alienware

[edyzmedieval]

Thread necromancy...

I have an insane friend who wants to spend his cash on an expensive laptop, and he came to me because everyone considers me the computer geek. I recommended him Falcon Northwest and he said its ok but he wants more information.

Are they worth it? He says he just wants it already built.
He made it and its worth 7000 euros, but he wants to know insider info like is the screen good, how is the power overall bla bla bla...

[Lemur]

Falcon NW is known for its desktops and Fragbox, not its notebooks. If you want a performance notebook from a high-end place, I'd recommend WidowPC since gaming/performance notebooks are their whole claim to fame. The other possibility would be Voodoo's laptops, but then you're getting into the serious high end.

Has your friend looked at the Dell XPS laptops? They're too nice to ignore, and the pricing is a little more sane than the small boutique builders ....

[KukriKhan]

Voodoo's top of the line Envy h-201 would fit the bill. At 16 pounds, and $4,000, portability and price need to NOT be a factor.

Still... by summer 2011, an h-201 owner-gamer would need to chuck it in favor of a new machine that would run 2011 games.

Having had laptops for 7 years now, I've become disillusioned with them; they're fine for text tasks, net-surfing, and communications - but crap in trying to keep up with advances in graphics, processors, and heat-dispersion.

Next Kukri machine will be a "Return to the Desktop". You read it here first.

[edyzmedieval]

I have an XPS M1710, and it works like a charm, but he said he wanted more power. True, if I had the cash I would do the same. I am extremely pleased with my XPS and while I was at school it provided excellent work + entertainment value.

I found Voodoo PC a bit too voodoo for my style, at least. He said he's taking Voodoo into consideration, but I personally do not like them because the only option is AMD processors, which are kind of bad.

WidowPC and Falcon NW are his choices.

I was thinking at one moment of buying a custom built Falcon NW desktop but I got a straight answer: forfeiting any other birthday gifts until I finish school.
It would have provided some excellent entertainment but I'll prolly switch from gaming sometime in the future so there was no use spending 9000 on something and living like a spartan afterwards. The desktop was a monster which would be at least medium-power in 6-7 years, with 2.3GB of video and 8GB of RAM.

[Whacker]

Edyz, why does your friend want a laptop? Is he a gamer, because laptops suck the big one when it comes to gaming. I always do a /facepalm whenever I read or hear someone saying "Oh yeah, I game a lot, I want a great system for gaming high end cpu and video OH it should be a laptop".

[edyzmedieval]

Because there is no point for him or me either to buy a desktop when for the past 2 years we will be 8 months a year at a boarding school.

[Whacker]

I still don't understand. Do you carry your machine around daily? Picking up a machine and moving it once every 8 months is nothing. The only people I have ever seen with a real need for a laptop are business(wo)men who travel daily or near-daily.

Guess I'll just be simple and blunt. It sounds somewhat like this is just a simple matter of someone wanting a laptop. That's great, as long as they understand what that entails. First, it's going to be much more expensive. Second, it's not going to be nearly as good as a desktop for gaming, and it will get obsolete FAST. This is experience talking, I went through this phase when I graduated college and bought a 3k laptop that had a real usable lifetime of about 6 months. Third, laptops tend to grow legs, and the average cable lock will last approx. 15-30 seconds against a determined thief. Again this is firsthand experience as a security professional who attended a physical security course, they gave us wirecutters and showed us how quickly we could hack through even the thicker cables, it was stunning.

It sounds like the person in question would be far better off with a desktop, which would be more practical, in line with their wants and needs, and not as expensive for better hardware. Yeah there may be other circumstances that haven't been mentioned, but at this stage this is what it sounds like.

Just my $0.02.