Alas, another m11x questionaire. College bound senior in need of some assistance please.?

Firsties.



I was entrusted with the task of choosing my own laptop for college. I'm a senior in high school, adore gaming and wish to make my parents happy by keeping it roughly under $1000.

Gaming was my interest so of course, like any n00b, the first company that came to mind was Alienware. Seeing that they had a laptop for under 1k for once was mind boggling. SO I customized it on their site and these are the specs I ended up with while still slightly breaking the 1k barrier.



- I upgraded the Overclockable Intel庐 Pentium鈩?SU4100 1.3GHz (2MB Cache) ---%26gt; Overclockable Intel庐 Core鈩? Duo SU7300 1.3GHz (3MB Cache) (+$100)

- I upgraded the 2GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 800MHz ---%26gt; 4GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 800MHz (+$50)

- I upgraded the 160GB SATAII 5,400RPM ---%26gt; 250GB SATAII 7,200RPM (+$50)

- I added Bluetooth Module, 2.1+ Enhanced Data Rate (+$20)

- I also added the Dell Online Backup 10GB for 1 year (+30)



In order if you may, I would appreciate it if I could get feed back on the upgrade and whether or not it is worth the extra money, AND whether or not I should add more. (i.e. The Hard drive: I'm sure i can put up another 25 to bump it to 360G)



I noticed the m11x also lacks a Disk Drive. Should I invest in a cheap $15 external drive for the system for installment of games and windows office?



Aside from the additions I added, the m11x runs on a 1GB NVIDIA庐 GeForce庐 GT 335M

11.6-inch WideHD 1366x768 (720p) WLED

Internal High-Definition Surround Sound Audio (5.1)

Alienware M11x a/b/g/n 2x2 MIMO Wireless.



Now take into consideration, I have NO idea what is good as opposed to what is bad. So i would GREATLY appreciate it if I can get responses.



The purpose of this laptop is for school but I intend on using it for games along the lines of WoW, GW2 (when it releases), MW2, Halo 2, Flyff and other MMO's. Will the m11x perform as well as it should? And please, if you have any other laptops within the one grand range, built for gaming relatively close if not better than the m11x, please post.



Thank you for your time if you sat and read this. ^^Alas, another m11x questionaire. College bound senior in need of some assistance please.?
Wow, long question, good choice of computer, for going to school it'll be a dream. Ok I'll try to help:



1. Overclockable Intel庐 Core鈩? Duo SU7300 1.3GHz (3MB Cache) (+$100)-- I don't really think this is worth the $100's for a 1MB upgrade.



2. 4GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 800MHz (+$50)-- Probably the best upgrade you could make on this laptop. I would say go ahead and upgrade to 8gb but it's really not necessary right now since most games only require a couple gigs max.



3. 250GB SATAII 7,200RPM (+$50)-- Another great upgrade. 7,200RPM is worth it. the only better thing would be to sacrifice some storage space for a solid state drive. They have no moving parts so they're less apt to break and data reads/writes faster which in turn makes loading times faster. that or get the bigger drive since most games are like 8-12Gb.



4. Bluetooth Module, 2.1+ Enhanced Data Rate (+$20)

Dell Online Backup 10GB for 1 year (+30)

for fifty bucks these are really no-brainers. If you were going to drop one i'd get rid of the backup. for $60 bucks you can get a 320Gb ext Hard drive to backup to for more than 1 year. but that's no biggie. bluetooth isn't really necessary but for $20 it's nice to have



5.WoW, GW2 (when it releases), MW2, Halo 2, Flyff and other MMO's-- The M11x will play these. maybe not at MAX settings but high/med-high



6. if you really need an external drive then get one, they're really cheap (typically). another alternaative is to put all your media (photos, videos, school work etc.) on a flash drive or ext. Hardrive and then use Steam or Direct2Drive for downloading games. that waythere's really no need for cd's, DVD's, or game discs.



So yeah, your configuration is great. just don't expect an M17x that can destroy every game and then some. this is a small computer that can still game but it does have it's limitations. also the keyboard, touchpad etc are great. but the screen is a little small for extreme long-term gaming. If I were you i'd get an HDMI cable and hook it up to a monitor/TV if I you were going to be using it for long periods of time. but overall a great computer.

If you were going to get a different PC and didn't mind it being heavier/bigger i'd recomend ASUS g73jh-a2. it's basically the alienware M17x with only one GPU (graphics card) that still has 1gb of memory (really good) and 1 terabyte (1000 Gb) hardrive. also it has an advanced cooling system so it NEVER gets hot even when gaming. it will run literally every game out right now on MAX or very high settings. one example I saw for myself was one of my friends was playing AC2 with FRAPS running and the FPS got no lower than 30. Here's a link to XoticPC where you can customize it and see the specs etc.. http://www.xoticpc.com/asus-g73jha2-order-p-2761.html

it's over your price range by a few hundred sooo i don't know. but Xotic has a lot of computers pretty cheap so you might wanna look there.

it's hard to find the g73jh-a2 in stock anywhere so that might be bad since you're going to college and you probably wouldn't want to wait for it to be in stock but it's a suggestion. congrats btw.