Brand New M17 Re-order

I had a pretty rough experience with my M17, Long story short! They are building me a brand new M17

The specs of my last design were as follows:


[1] M17

Video/Graphics Card: Dual 512MB ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 3870 - CrossFireX™ Enabled!
Processor: Intel® Core™2 Extreme Quad QX9300 2.53GHz (12MB Cache, 1066MHz FSB)
Chassis: 17-Inch WideUXGA 1920 x 1200 LCD (1200p) with Clearview Technology
Keyboard Options: Illuminated Keyboard – Alienware Exclusive Design - Astral Blue
Operating System (Office software not included): Genuine Windows Vista® Ultimate (64-bit Edition) with Service Pack 1
Notebook Tuners and Remotes: Without Media Center Remote Control or TV Tuner
Memory: 4GB« Dual Channel DDR3 SO-DIMM at 1066MHz – 2 x 2048MB

System Drive: Extreme Performance (RAID 0) - 1TB (500GB x 2) 5,400RPM (8MB Cache)
Optical Drives : 8x Dual Layer Burner (DVD±RW, CD-RW) w/ LightScribe Technology - View Demo
Laser-Etch Your Label Directly to the Disc!
Wireless Network Card: Internal Intel® Ultimate N 5300 a/b/g/Draft-N Mini-Card with MIMO Technology
The World's First 450 Mbps Wi-Fi Adapter

Basicly I have to design a new M17 from the website thats the same cost as my old one, or if its more pay the difference.

After several conversations with the critical agents team ive found out that 1 Nvidia card is able to fit in the M17, If I can get a 9800M GTX instead of Dual 512MB ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 3870 I definately would

although i doubt that will happen because they would already offer that on their site.

Anyways Ive noticed the differences from the website from my last specs is now there are 7,200 rpm HDDs.. still tryin to decide wheither to go with the solid state drives or not as well..

does anyone know if you can use the Lightscribe technology with the Blu-ray reader offered with the M17?

 

Yeah, you won't be able to get a card Alienware does not offer.

The Blu-ray drive offered on the M17 does not have LightScribe capability.

Solid State Disks are expensive and you get a lot more GB/dollar with a hard drive. Also, unlike hard drives, you need to be very careful with the brand of SSD. Some SSDs are slow and not much faster than hard drives. For example, see the results of the SSD in this Toshiba laptop I tested:
http://www.notebookreview.com/printArticle.asp?newsID=4712
Get hard drives with your system. You can upgrade to SSDs rather easily. Do that in the future when the technology gets cheaper.
I see you got RAID 0 with your last config . . . don't get that. RAID 0 provides little performance gain (~3%) and you double the risk of data loss since you are depending on two hard drives. Either do RAID 1 (mirrored data - very safe), or get a single drive.

 

same with me i do not go for raid the risk vs speed is not worth it
i had a friend who had papers due and his raid crashed and poof F's lol.

the 9800gtx is not offered by AW and will not be able to get it

and no light scribe

6 more to go chaz