Ever wondered what the inside of a W840Di/AW M17 looks like?

Top with palm rest removed (most of the area is covered by the insulating shield)


Bottom:


Bottom of palm rests of W840Di (right) and W830Da (a.k.a Alienware M9700, left)


For those who inquired about this earlier, a palm rest from an Alienware M9700 (W830Da) or a M9750 (W835Di) would NOT fit on the W840Di's frame. If you look at the bottom right of each palm rest in respect to the picture, you can see that the two screw pillars do not line up accordingly. Also, the area under the keyboard for the M9700 and M9750 blocks out the connector for the keyboard lights on the W840Di chassis. And also, a W840 keyboard will NOT fit in a M9700/M9750 palm rest because the keyboard is a bit too big (horizontally) to fit in and the screw pillar on the W840's keyboard is also blocked by plastic on the M9700 and M9750 palm rests.

 

thank you--most illuminating

 

bah....cant see the inset pics...can you do attachments? plz....

 

Thanks for the pics.

Try going to the link, then refreshing the page once it is loaded. That is the only way I can get imageshack to work.

 

its the network here on base....i have tried before...they just block all tons of sites...meh!

 

would just posting direct links to the full size pictures help?

 

sure no offense but image shack is so slow

 

ahh so you finally were able to verify fitment. thank you

 

If only Flextronics had put the sub-woofer somewhere else they could have added another fan. ;/

 

Yeah, the 'subwoofer' did not do a whole lot for the sound of this notebook.

 

i can imagine.

on a side note, how is the optical drive location working out? is it better/more useful to put the OD on the front rather than on the side?

 

anyone else notice the 'pun' in this statement?

 

lol, i didn't even notice that

 

Heck, if only they had bothered putting in a subwoofer at all. I get better sound from a couple of Contadina tomato paste cans and some fishing line.....

Now, to bring the discussion on the optical drive placement back "front" and "center" I remain of mixed mind on this one. On the plus side, I hate notebooks with the speaker jack placed on the front. I hook my notebook up to some fairly decent speakers when listening to music and on those notebooks the speaker cords are forever in the way....I'd think it would be a problem for people with headphones, too...

The optical drive on the front works great most of the time, but every once in while when the laptop is, well, on my lap, it's a pain.

I think I prefer it on the front over the speaker on the front, but I probably would have preferred both on the side....can't have every thing....

 

Design features manufacturers should make more use of:

-slot-load optical drives
-smart-bays that can be swapped out for an extra battery (M15x)
-speakers in the bezel around the screen
-speakers in the palm rest
-speakers on the sides of and/or above the keyboard

For this chassis I would have placed a sub-woofer in the crotch position (for obvious reasons of enjoyment other than just sound quality) and added two more speakers in the lid above the screen...one on each side of the camera.

A second GPU fan would then cool the 4870x2.

 

For me it's a mix. The advantage is that it's right in front of you and you don't have to move much to put in or eject a CD. But the disadvantage is when you are actually sitting it on your lap, you could accidently hit the eject button with your belly, which could be annoying at times.

no problem. I've been meaning to do it a while, but since my GPU fried and I broke the hinge while trying to fix things, I decided to pull everything out just to check it (since I got as far as to breaking the hinge). But now, I got a new master GPU and it works fine (though everything is still apart) and I'm thinking about flashing the dead GPU into a slave card since it still works, but won't post on the LCD.

As for the hinge, I'm actually going to use this time to send the palmrest, HD caddies and a spare lid from another Alienware M97xx and get all three painted metallic white with a matte finish for the palm rest. Should be fun.

 

i love the drive in the front myself