Alienware-M11x

Name of product: 

Date of purchase: 

My Review 

The Alienware M11x is a mixed bag. It's quite fast for an 11" notebook. It's about the size of a netbook, though significantly heavier and fatter. However, it's significantly faster. The CPU is not terribly fast, but the graphics card can handle every game I tried on it.

If you turn the nVidia card off, you get an amazing 6 hours of battery life, even with the backlight up and doing CPU-intensive tasks. But if you want to turn the video card on and play a game, the battery drains so quickly, you're better off plugging it in.

Overall, it's a good little machine, but the small problems really add up.

They keyboard is terrible. It's backlit, but just barely too small and is not suitable at all for touch typing. There are no spaces between the keys so you can't feel them and are constantly looking down.

The screen has a great response time and the colors are good. But (there are a lot of 'buts' with this laptop) the viewing angle is extremely narrow. This isn't much of a problem with most monitors, but on a laptop where you're not exactly in a set position, it's a problem. You're constantly adjusting the screen. Also, when you close the lid, it touches the keys so even if you don't touch the screen, the oils from your fingers get onto the screen.

The touchpad is particularly bad. It's textured, and with a lot of use, it'll make your fingertips numb. The buttons are spongy, it's sometimes difficult to tell if you've actually clicked or not. The sensitivity is bad. If you turn sensitivity up, even getting your hand near it will make the mouse pointer jump around. If you turn it down, it's very difficult to use. It's supposedly multitouch, but things like two finger taps don't work well. And with the sensitivity up, trying to tap the touchpad will make the pointer jump around.

The speakers are weak and tinny. You can't expect much from laptop speakers, but the speakers in most netbooks are better. The left speaker is also significantly louder than the right speaker.

Finally, the hard drive creates quite a lot of vibration. This is a common problem with the M11x, you can find various discussion threads on the Internet about this. It's quite an annoyance, and will make your palms numb after a lot of typing.

Overall, this is a good little machine with a whole heap of little problems. If you're willing to overlook these little problems, I don't know of any other 11" notebooks that have the speed and battery life of the M11x.

Screen Size 

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Why Did You Choose This Laptop? 

No other computer of this size had the same features, or a graphics card this fast. The great battery life when not gaming was also a huge plus.

Would you recommend this to a friend?