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Alienware Area 51 m15x

65

Fair

  • Pros
  • Seemless, clean design
  • Great performance-tweaking apps
  • Cons
  • Slightly creaky display lid
  • Expensive

What You Should Know about the Area 51 m15x

Multitask to Your Heart's Content and Not Bog Down

This laptop, equipped with at least 3GB of memory, will run all of your programs quickly (paired with a high-end CPU, that much memory will make things especially speedy). You'll be able to multitask to your heart's content, too, so go ahead--you can back up the entire contents of your hard drive to a DVD while watching YouTube videos and experimenting with textures on the 2MB photo of your client's art gallery in Photoshop. The main drawback is the extra expense: Loading up with more than the standard amount of RAM (2GB, these days) can add hundreds of dollars to a laptop's price, though it boosts performance by only about 10 percent. Also bear in mind that if you hope to use more than 3GB of RAM effectively, your PC must have a 64-bit installation of Windows.

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