Michael

Any guesses as to WHEN that m18x might come out ? I am getting tired of waiting on it, AW are lucky there are no alternatives or they would've lost a customer.

LOL man! /10char

actually please go ahead, i need a proof reader anyway

you guys might be able to reduce the restart time even more using my coming up article about diagnosing shutdown times. i think it's going up tomorrow.. just making the finishing touches.

That's a hellova system man! Can u reuse the water cooling components or did u loose those too?

Thanks, Stam, i'll update the article.

i found newegg to be really tightassed about the payment methods. I have a shipping address in US but they neither accept my international credit card nor my Paypal.

Suuuuure! Let me run some benches for you ! Oh... wait... where's my m17x?!?!?!? That's right, sold.. interested in some HP benches ?

heh Well, to me it seems like the leap from getlost to getfound is not that big It does suck discovering someone else is using ur nick My nick is mfractal, and the reason is that i was super interested in fractals when i studied them back in school, and it kinda became my obsession for a while, back then i needed a DJ name (i also DJ psytrance) and after thinking about it for about 3 minutes i came up with m for my first name which is Michael plus fractal. Pretty unique man, never had an issue with any service P.S - I discovered the new smileys, had to use a bunch of them!!

Appreciate your support guys! That was a RAID 0 setup with 2x500GB 7200RPM drives.. nothing fancy was done on them.. Is it really that good ?

How unsurprisingly messed up

Great! Thanks! You can also come visit even if you aren't banned

A bit? Putting a link to our forum I'm your sig over there might help

Fixed, and welcome to the forums

16gb is a godsend for those that run multiple VMs on the same machine. It happens a lot that I need to simulate q real working environment running a cluster of db servers plus a cluster of application servers. That could mean 4-5 VMs running and if I allocate 2gb of memory to each vm that's 10gigs right there. But I agree that for non development purposes there is a little to do with more that 8 gigs.

LMAO! Nice ones guys! keep em comin'!

Ohh man, how i hope you are right, and soooooon!!

True that I wasn't interested in the m15x, and you are right that i went for the absolute best "most powerful" alienware had to offer and that was the R2 and the R1 before that. They branded their 17" rigs as the absolute power you can get in a laptop which the R3 is not. That's all I wanted to say. In my opinion it would have been a better move for them like I and Brian mentioned to take the XPS 17 and make it what R3 is today and keep up with their tradition for the 17" AW beasts. Again, my opinion... Haha! Mad skillz u got there! That's the spirit! Positive thinking, just like in "The Secret" LOL!

^^ I think the R3 would have much more popularity and support if Dell would make it's under their brand. AW should be reserved for the most powerful stuff IMO.

As much as i miss an Alienware laptop now that I have sold mine, I am not even looking in the R3's direction. To me it's total disappointment and while I agree that weight and battery life are important, the m17x was always marketed and branded as the holy grail of laptop power and the R3 is just not that. Unfortunately... Where's that m18x again?

nice work and good idea mw86! +1 on the higher quality pix request

haha, no other dell's screen before or after competes with the rgbled i hope they cut the b.s and spit our the m18x with a decent rgbled screen

Haha! That's if you have someone willing to shell out that much money and then go through the hassle of sending it to you. Not everybody have that. Plus Myus shipping rates are waaaaay cheaper than sending it the normal way. Shipping a 20+ pounds laptop via fedex abroad is very expensive. With myus it's about 60% cheaper.

This work may not be reproduced without the written permission of the author Hi all. I currently live in Israel and here, as well as in many other countries that i know of the price difference when buying computers between local Alienware and Alienware US is huge. So, i decided to try and by my new M17x from USA. I thought i'd share my knowledge since some of the members here asked me to explain how i did it. There are actually 2 things stopping a person from ordering. 1. Dell US won't ship anywhere except US. 2. You need a US issued credit card to complete your payment through the website. (there's also a paypal payment option, but that does not work either since your credit card that paypal uses has to be us issued too) I solved the first issue, using a mail forwarding service. There are lots of them available and shipping rates vary, i used US Mail Forwarding, International Shipping | MyUS.com as they seemed the most reliable company but feel free to do your own research. Easy shopping in the U.S.A also is worth consideration . Now for the next part - i was able to pay using my international credit card over the phone. I tried lots of support numbers but i found that using 1-800-999-3355 (blackhawk team i think) gave me the best results. Their team is very professional and they are actually in the US . I created my laptop setup, added it to cart and saved my cart. Then i called customer support explaining that i am not a US citizen but i have a shipping address inside us and a international credit card that i wish to use to pay for my laptop. That did the trick. There's also a wire transfer option available, but i can't verify that since i used the credit card path. But i was told this is an option by one of the reps. I should also note, that Dell will most certainly try and contact you over the phone to confirm your identity since the purchase is made with international card. So you should also have a US phone number and that number should preferably be from the same city as your shipping address otherwise it raises red flags. (shipping address from one state, phone number from another and credit card from another country does look suspicious). To get a US phone number i used Skype as it is reliable and relatively decently priced. To have a US phone number call your cellphone using Skype follow those 2 steps: 1. purchasing a US number from Skype that is forwarded to your Skype account 2. Forwarding your Skype account (in case you're not logged in to Skype) to a cellphone - rates apply.. 1. go to Free Skype calls and cheap calls to phones - Skype, login or create a user, and get to your Account tab. From there choose Online Number -> get online Number -> Choose US -> Choose Florida -> Choose Sarasota -> Choose a number and activate it. Now you have a number that when called will redirect you to your skype account. 2. Now all you have to do is set up Call forwarding : From Account tab : Choose Call Forwarding -> Add number -> follow the on screen instructions to complete the wizard. Now test, just call the number and watch your cellphone ring Please note, that i still need to pay forwarding to Israel which is about 200$ with fedex plus i will need to pay import tax when it arrives here. But i found that it is still marginally cheaper than buying the same configuration here. One more thing, if you want your warranty to become international you have to buy the complete care (they call it advanced warranty now) for three years. Anything below that will get you US only warranty. (Which is transferable to your country). The difference being, that with complete care, you do not have to transfer your warranty to get service abroad. (with some limitations) Thought it was worth mentioning too. Note that HIDevolution.com - Specializing in customized computers, electronics, and mobile devices for gamers and professionals can order the system for international buyers for a small fee and ship it. But if you want to be in control of the whole process, my way is better, and cheaper. Guys this is pretty important... I had my first two orders canceled, just because my credit card is not US issued - Dell just classified it as fraud, automatically, without even speaking to me before. The way to go about it is to demand, at the time of purchase, that your sales rep makes contact with the "credit card order processing" department. Make the rep explain to them the situation (you're abroad, shipping to US address etc) and make them approve the order at the spot. So, do your math and good luck!

First, The Results WEI score, left side is SSD :) Crystal Disk Mark ATTO Disk Benchmark Boot time (sorry forgot to screenshot the before, it was 82 seconds) : And now, i'll list the operations i've done to optimize my new SSD's performance. I won't go into the reasoning for those steps, they've been discussed time and time again, this post is just to organize the steps to execute them. So here we go: 1. Reinstall windows from scratch. 2. Installing all the drivers, chipset first and then the rest with restarts in between. 3. move c:users directory from my SSD to the data drive using symbolic link 1. Booted with windows 7 Media, chose repair windows 2. choose command prompt 3. copy users to hdd (when booting like that my C drive became E and D remained) robocopy "E:Users" "D:Users" /mir /xj /e 4. rmdir e:users /Q /S (you might want to just rename it in case there are porblems) 5. mklink /J e:users d:users (when booting like that my C drive became E and D remained) restart and you should see your users directory on the data drive Then run services.msc to disable the following services: 1. Disk Defragmenter 2. Superfetch 3. Windows Search Alternatively you can start an elevated command prompt and run the following three commands sc config defragsvc start= disabled sc config SysMain start= disabled sc config WSearch start= disabled OUTPUT FOR EACH SHOULD BE : [SC] ChangeServiceConfig SUCCESS Next, Open my computer, right click on the SSD drive choose properties and remove the checkbox from "Allow files from this drive to have contents indexed..." press Ok, and then choose the recursive option, OK and wait for it to finish. Next i enabled write caching on the SSD drive, for that, we need to go to device manager. (Right click on my computer, Manage and choose device manager). There we need to expand the "Disk Drives" section and select the Intel SSD... device, and right click properties on it, in a window that opens choose policies tab and check the second checkbox that says "Turn on windows write cache buffer..." Disable superfetch and prefetch: run regedit go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetContro lSession ManagerMemory ManagementPrefetchParameters Set 0 on EnablePrefetcher EnableSuperfetch Disable Hibernate : start an elevated command prompt (start, in the search box write cmd, right click the result and select run as administrator) C:Windowssystem32>powercfg -h offFinally disable system restore: Right click on Computer, Properties, Advanced System Settings, select system protection tab, choose the SSD drive (usually C),press Configure and select Turn Off System Protection. Thanks TheSSDReview) Since i have 8 gigs of memory i've also disabled the pagefile. This step is not usually recommended for people with 4 gigs but Les here says he runs fine - test at your own risk :) Comments welcome :) EDIT: Some more tips : LargeSystemCache HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory Management, I change LargeSystemCache from 0 to 1 Memory Usage of the NTFS file system - Looks like it's oboslete, decide yourself HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE System CurrentControlSet Control FileSystem NtfsMemoryUsage = 2 (Normal = 1, Increased = 2; Default = 1) Disable the 8.3 Name Creation on NTFS Partitions HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlFileSystem NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation On the Edit menu, click DWORD. By default, the value for this entry is set to 0. Type a value of 1 in the Data field. Disable the NTFS Last Access Time Stamp HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlFileSystem NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate = 1 (0 = disable, 1 = enable) (Thanks StamatisX)