The Official M9750 Owners Lounge

I asked if I could add a second drive if I purchased a single drive configuration and I was told I could. I wouldn't bet on their informaiton on being too reliable, though. Someone who ordered a single config should tell us ;D

 

You can, many people have confirmed it with the 9700, which uses the same chassis as the 9750. So if you decide to.. for example.. want a RAID config in the future, it will be possible, the motherboard will be RAID enabled regardless of whether you take advantage of it at the time of purchase.

 

I work in a post production sound studio so I deal with and work with people that maintain the computers that handle our massive video/audio editing/recording tasks. So I was picking brains about having a laptop with a raid config and advantages and disadvantages.

I learned that while a RAID 0 system would have faster access times than 2 separate drives, there is less total storage space in the RAID config due to formatting issues and such than 2 separate drives. And according to them, 99 percent of software wouldnt be any different between the 2 as far as speed cause the faster drives are fast enough. In other words, the drive access speed either way, wouldnt hold anything up more than the other.

I also learned that a lot of audio video production software we work with, wont necessarily SEE drives in a RAID config as a recording drive. Like Pro Tools (the most used audio production/recording software for the profess world) wont record or work off of drives in a RAID config. At least this is the case with the Mac version of the software (what most people in studios use). I dont know if theres a reason PC versions would be different. This may be a factor for someone like me that wants to use this laptop for these purposes and cant decide to get RAID or just 2 drives.

I dont know about other software working off of RAID or not..



And I dont see the purpose of using a RAID 1 system in a laptop unless you are handlng top important government files or credit card company customer info or something......

Any thoughts anyone?

just trying to figure out what I want and why.

 

I think RAID 0 is not very useful. My M9750 has 2x 160GB 7200RPM drives in it in RAID 0 and I don't notice much of any difference doing most tasks versus a single drive. RAID 0 only provides a 3 - 5% performance boost on average over a single drive in general usage. For specialized applications it can provide a serious boost but for the average user, no. You double the risk of losing your data with RAID 0 because you are depending on two drives.

RAID 1 is very useful for anybody in my opinion - it's a fail-safe. You lose one drive to failure, and you still have all your data. There is no performance loss. I'd get RAID 1 in a heartbeat over RAID 0.

 

To me though, why not just get an external drive to back up to? Then have twice the space in the laptop (not raid, just 2 drives).
I dont know about anyone else, but it takes 3 minutes at the end of the night to fire up Norton Ghost and dump everything to an external drive that is cheap and then my laptop isnt my backup storage as well. Im not arguing Chaz - I for one have really appreciated all your input here on this board!! You are very helpful and nice to everyone here...

But if your backup drive is in the same place as the main drive - your laptop, yeah, its a backup, but then if something happens to the laptop (stolen or lost or whatever), then you lose everything. Id rather have a bigger internal storage space, and backup to something that lives in a safe place.


Hard drives dont crash that often and what are most of us doing on our laptops that need instant backup security 24/7?

So back to my orig thought, I just dont see the big advantage of having a RAID config in one laptop. RAID is very important in a situation like my job where we are backing up to RAID every day files that are involved in a job that is thousands of dollars of work per day, but for a personal laptop?

Id love to hear other perspectives as the whole idea of this is new to me and maybe Im missing something.

 

Hey! I just got an email from Alienware that they will be at Comic Con this year for anyone here that goes to that huge convention in San Diego. I will get to see one of these and hold it which Id like to do before buying.
from them:

"Greetings from Alienware!

I have received a response from our Marketing team and they said that we will be at Comic Con this year and we are definitely bringing a m9750 system."

 

That's a good point. With RAID 1 though, you can just pick up where you left off - no need to restore or anything like that.

If I were actually buying a notebook that took dual hard drives, I'd take a 7200RPM drive as primary and a secondary storage drive (probably a 5400RPM for the most capacity). The problem with RAID is that it does affect battery life although I don't know how much. When you read/write data to a RAID array you are using all of the drives in the system. With RAID 0 the data is striped so it is reading/writing to two drives. With RAID 1 you're writing/reading to two drives as well because the data is mirrored - what you do to one drive happens to the other.

I've always used an external hard drive to back up my data.

 

All good points.............


What is the deal with RAM. If I get 1GB, will Vista at least "work" and I can buy more soon after getting the laptop? and if I get 1GB, I wll have to remove that to put the 2 G I buy right? Meaning, theres probably only 2 slots right? and if I buy 2 GB elsewhere, it will come in 2 parts of 1GB each?

 

hey theres a multi page review here I just stumbled across. dont know if you have all seen it........

http://www.trustedreviews.com/notebooks/review/2007/06/29/Alienware-Area-51-m7950/p1

 

Ive seen people talking about this here and its addressed in this interview Ive posted link to...

"Still, with DX10 games such as Crysis looming the 7950s could seem to be a limitation so I was relieved to confirm that Alienware will offer an upgrade path to mobile 8800s when they appear, though there is absolutely no information at present on when this might be or how much it might cost."

 

Ok so in my situation what raid or what do i do? I am not all up to date as of yet.

I have one 80gb 5400 set at primary for now. And one 160gb 7200 sitting waiting to be deployed. What is the best combination for speed, and to set one as storage. I would ideally want to keep the 80gb as primary and set 160 as storage but i might not gain the benefits of the 7200? If the above setup does work how do i go around setting it up. Thanks

 

The M9750 has two slots. If you order 1GB you will get 2x 512MB modules so yes you will have to replace them both. Vista will work on 1GB, yes. Remember you can use a flash memory device to speed up your machine:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/readyboost.mspx

You can order 2x 1GB kits or simply buy two 1GB modules separate. See the RAM DEALS thread.

 

It will also work with one 2GB stick and one included 512MB. (Thats what I'm running on now)

 

and it sees all of it?

Is the price for a 2G stick more than 2 1Gs?

Just trying to figure out the cheapest way to get the most RAM

 

now that ive had my m9750 for acouple days now i am loving it more then ever its just so amazing how it plays games ive ran battlefield 2 and battlefield 2142 on high settings with out any lag or freezing the sound and the screen is amazing and ihope you guys enjoy it as much as i am now i remember seeing something like the labtop makes noise to be honest this is a pretty darn quiet machine for the power it has it will be really quiet when not playin games to be honest when you play the game you get so lost in the sound of the speakers where you dont hear anything but the game it really is amazing. i am glad ive not yet encountered a problem as everything is performing the way its suppose to ive also really suprised on how cool it keeps during games ill try to make a review i didnt get to take any pictures when i got it cause it was just so hard to do anything i wanted to open it so bad lol but yes i will keep you updated

 

Does anyone have pictures of the underside of the laptop? Would someone be so bold to open the laptop up so we all can see how the inside of it actually looks like? I know it's similar to the 9700, but I just want someone to clarify this by showing us some pictures. Thank

 

well i got some pics but idk how to post i mean i did that attach file thingy but shows some kinda error

 

Your pictures are probably too big. Try resizing them.

 

The Alienware support site actually has some good pics of m9750's guts.

http://support.alienware.com/

Search for 9750 (I got 24 results). If you wade through all that you get some interesting info. On the second page it talks about replacing the VC, and they show you how to remove the heat sink (cool setup, but scary operation IMO).

http://4help.alienware.com/cgi-bin/...nBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9OTc1MA**&p_li=&p_topview=1

I'm sure I found a pic of the bottom there also, but it's the same as the 9700. Alienware did post a pic of the bottom of the 9700 in their gallery.

http://www.alienware.com/product_de...-LT-AURORA-M-9700&SubCode=SKU-DEFAULT#pdp-nav

 

For raid the drives need to be exactly the same. You can still use both drives.

I would make my faster drive the primary.

If you have the respawn kit and the mounts for the second HD this could be easy. Check with AW.

 

Its exactly like the m9700 I heard (as it uses the same chassis), you can get a clearer picture at Alienware's website for the m9700. I know theres a picture over at notebookforums.com with the panel removed to expose the sli gpu's.

 

just got my 9750 yesterday and this machine is awesome!

 

Mine also arrived yesterday, and I am blown away by it.

I love it.

 

Ok rub it in guys 3 and a bit weeks and counting

More first impressions please !!!

 

just a few things I noticed
*no antenna for the tv tuner. (tried antenna from my pinnacle usb hd tuner) poor reception.
*no respaw option for pre-sale buyers. (they were already builing it,when it became avilable)
*the power adapter is extremely large.
*usb reciever for the media center remote. (my Alienware 766 had buit in infrared)
*volume dial (just spins and doesn't stop, unlike my AW 766 or my AW 5550)
just minor things, the things I really liked however,
*lagre bright screen (1920x1200)
*good graphics. (can't wait for sli support in Vista)
*cd drive in front. (wasn't sure about at first, but I really like it.)
*media center remote stores in express card slot.
*not too heavy for a 17" (less than my 766)
Just a few notes on my first day.

 

Thanks mikemagri. Mine is being shipped right now. FedEx hasn't updated yet but as of 10:51 AM yesterday mine departed from Orlando (it's coming up to WI). Hopefully I'll have mine for the weekend like the ship date says! I also was a little disappointed with no respawn option. Oh well.

 

haha well before you know it you will have your m9750 .

i dont know about you but i played games on my desktop to keep me busy while waiting even though my desktop didnt play games so well lol

 

Enjoy it guys,

Nice details "MikeMagri"

 

I personally think Respawn is a waste of money... as its just a ghost of the HDD when shipping... which would then include outdated drivers when using it later down the road. If I were to ever need to reformat or reinstall windows, I'd prefer to install the latest drivers with a clean install of windows, vs. having to uninstall old drivers before installing new ones.

I just realized the media center remote has a usb receiver too, I would have liked infrared, if even just for the remote. I'm curious, how big is the usb receiver - it looks rather big...

 

Can someone please post measurments of the power brick? And if possible weigh it? Im trying to find out how it compares to my Dell 9100 Power brick - which is like the size of a small laptop - ok not really but man its big. The Laptop and the powerbrick sometimes fight and sometimes the power brick wins. Its a bully!

Ok please stop my sillyness and post the measurments?


thanks

 

So a question for all of you - I am not a gamer but if I buy a new Laptop, Id like to play some of the good games. I thought I could do that with my Dell 9100 (when it came out) but there was some thing that would happen that the monitor would switch resolution upon loading a game, then immediately switch back to high resolution, and keep trying to switch back till the game would crash. This did this on every game and Dell wasnt much help and I finally gave up.

1. Does anyone know what this was?

2. Im gathering here people are saying that getting the higher resolution screen wont actually make games better but make them worse? Can someone please explain this to me? (I understand its more to process but arent games made for this amazing resolution?)

3. When you people play all the games, do you guys switch the resolution down for better gaming or do you just change settings in that game itself.

4. Are games made each at a specific ideal resolution


5. are these dumb questions?


thanks

edit - fixed typos

 

Phase 5 nyoro~n

also, change the resolution of your games at their settings menu. Typically, games run faster at lower resolutions as higher runs are more difficult to process. As for your problem, you were probably loading a game at default settings which would cause the game to load in another resolution (the game's default resolution) different from your laptop's native resolution. I think, anyway.

 

Can you tell use

Processor ?
Memory ?
Grapic Card ?

 

Edubardus i agree on that..

Change the resolution of your games at their settings menu. Typically, games run faster at lower resolutions as higher runs are more difficult to process.

 

Pentium 4 3.2Ghz

512 RAM

ATI Radeon 9700

Now mnd you this was bought in spring 2004 and the reviews considered it Dells best laptop for breaking into the gaming world.
I wasnt even playing top end games at the time but every game (even simple ones like Hoyles Vegas type card games) would do this resolution swich thing that would just go back and forth (like it was trying to switch, then my computer would force it back to the high res) till it would crash. The only way I could get them to play was to manually switch my resolution WAY down first, then start the game. I cant imagine thats what you all do to play games.

 

are these dumb questions ?

No.. only dumb answers !!

look a litlle bite around on this site

 

i ordered mines on July 5th and its on Phase 5

i ordered it with eveverything basic except dvd burner

 

it should not be a problem..
with that proccesor

But like i said look a little bit around if you want to buy a new one

something like NP9260, M9750

First you have to ask yourself, wat do you want to do with it...
and also important, how much budget

 

Izane US or UK

lucky bastard .........!!

 

that was rather quick. Although Alienware keeps telling me that their site is 'broken' (considering my status went from phase 4 to 3 2 days ago, I'll believe it) so I've been calling everyday to see if there is any progress. Haven't done so today, but it should be in production like the site says.

 

order on 27-06-2007

now phase 4 since 8 days

probably the uk orders r hold back to satisfy the us market?

 

alienware usually builds the systems rather fast i think for everyone including myself that opted to not choose the wuxga model the system was produced faster because there was less of a delay overall. I also assume that they have a lot of the other resolution in stock as opposed to the vast orders of the higher resolution.

So if you did order the higher resolution you get setback than the person who got the lower resolution. Thats what happened with mine i got mine rather fast than what they said it would take to build it.

Just hang on in there the system itself is very nice xD and worth the wait.

 

I just realized I probably won't be able to use my x-brand laptop stand I normally use on my XPS2 with the m9750 due to the grip holding the laptop from the front. ;_;

 

its for US order

 

i ordered the base system with 1.6 ghz processor the 7950 video card 1gb ram windows xp sp2 and the HDD is 80gb i will upgrade the processor myself
i did it this way because for one it will be built quickly secocnd i can get the parts cheaper except the sli video,

 

Lol... I know what you mean there. I used to have a desktop PC and though it was knocking on a bit it could play games though not the latest releases but I've recently moved and had to get rid of it (lack of space) In the meantime I've been surviving on my old Acer Travelmate 800 (circa 2003) so PC gaiming is no longer an option... but I've kept my gaming habit alive with my xbox 360

I've really missed my PC gaming though so the M9750 can't get here quick enough!

 

typing this post up on my brand new m9750

I was curious which vid drivers i should be using as i have vista on here and im having a fun time tring to find vista drivers for the geforce go's

 

As noted it will be more difficult for the machine to run games at higher resolutions because it takes that much more processing power. However it will look better - you'll be able to see finer detail.

Check our driver update guide here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=64910

 

Hi all,
I'm posting this as a reply cause for some reason I'm not able to post a new thread. This is my first post here and I'm anxiously awaiting my first Laptop (m9750) so I don't have to keep lugging around my shuttle and flatscreen from ship to ship. I ordered it on June 10th, made it to phase 8 and am back at phase 6. I called today (July 11th) and they said it should ship out by this Friday. My fingers are crossed. Here's the Spec's:

T7200 2.0 Ghz
XP Pro
WUXGA 1920 x 1200
2GB at 667 Mhz
RAID 0 (100GB x 2)
8x Dual Layer CD-RW/DVD+-RW
(1) 512MB GeForce 7950 GTX
Wireless 4965 a/b/g/Draft-n mini card
Belkin AC Anywhere 300W Vehicle outlet adapter

I know I could have bought this config. cheaper but I really like the case etc. I don't play cutting edge games, I play things like C&C Generals and BFME2. Mostley with my kids or when I'm on a ship. Hopefully I'm only a week away from it. It was supposed to ship on July 3rd.

Nice forum,
Rob

 

Well my laptop is up and running and is amazing. The harddrives were fairly easy to upgrade as were the ram. I reinstalled vista with the drivers and cd they gave and it was very simple so now i have a primary set up as 160gb at 7200 rpm and secondary as 80gb at 5400.

If anyone is worried about losing the OS and you just got the factory settings dont bother with ghost since there isn't much you installed. Faster to just install the cd's with what alienware gave.