A Step Up From The 486 DX

I placed an order for an Alienware MJ-12m 7700 this afternoon. For those of you unfamiliar with Alienware, they're a Florida-based company that sells customized PCs via the internet. In many respects they are a Dell for people who want or need better hardware or service. They hype their gaming computers first and foremost, but unlike their primary competitors Falcon Northwest and Voodoo, Alienware offers professionals some more serious computers that have a little less styling and a little more bang for their buck. The MJ-12m 7700 is the current highend "portable workstation." The key specs of the system I selected are below; take a look if this kind of this thing interest you.

This is my second computer (I'm still getting along just fine with my 2001 Dell Inspiron 8000), but the fifth computer on which I've been a regular user. Our family got its first PC in 1993. It was a 486 DX (not one of those sorry SXs), although I was quickly frustrated that we had VGA graphics instead of VGA+ like my cousins did. (It actually did limit our software options substantially.) Perhaps the coolest feature our computer had this thing called a "cee dee rom" that the salesperson thought was likely to be quite important in the coming years. (He was correct, and we actually upgraded to a double-speed CD-ROM eventually.) It's funny thinking about how many copies of that computer would be needed to match this new laptop I'm getting. Probably it's only slightly less funny than thinking in the year 2017 how many copies of my 2005 laptop would equate to my new handheld.

Case Alienware® MJ12m 7700 Case with 17" WideSXGA+ 1680 x 1050 LCD Display with Built-in Camera
Motherboard Intel® 915P Chipset Supporting PCI-Express
Processor Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 530J w/ HT Technology 3.0GHz 1MB Cache
Memory 1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SO-DIMM at 533MHz - 2 x 512MB
Graphics Accelerator Alienware® MJ12m 7700 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Go with 256MB of DDR3 memory
Hard Drive RAID 0 - 160GB (80GB x 2) 5400 RPM ATA100
Primary Optical Drive 8X Dual Layer DVD+/-RW / 24X CD-RW Combo w/Software
Wireless Network Internal Wireless 802.11a/b/g miniPCI Card