Not gonna argue with personal perceptions of "what's portable", that is up to the individual. Alienware can come up with a 19/21/23incher in a laptop form factor, and still there would be people who claims it is portable enough, because they want power, in the "portable" sense that you've mentioned before. Hell, if one does not wanna part from his desktop, and carry it with this:-



, in his mind, it is portable to him, since he is willing to carry it around with him. The question is, where do you draw the line? Nobody's wrong or right, since it is up to the willingness of the one carry the burden to decide what's "portable" and what's not.

As for me, weight and size beyond 15inch, does not the realm of "portability". Again, this is IMO.

This post has been edited by stringfellow: Mar 5 2010, 12:14 AM

@Michaelbyz,

If you're free, we can meet up and we diagnose your problems together. Truthfully, I find your problems perplexing. Just yesterday evening I was playing SFIV in a very warm environment with no aircon (the place has shut down its aircon to save money), and I've been running it from 6pm till 9pm, nonstop, smooth like butter.

I wouldn't wanna suggest things without looking into your configuration, sometimes it is as a simple a case as properly updating your Windows 7 using Windows Update. The high CPU usage may be because you have updates running in the background, be it from W7 updates or your antivirus. There are no driver updates needed for the M11X, the moment you run it for the first time, it is as updated as it should be. The only drivers you need updating are from the external accessories you'd add in after, such as your mouse, external DVD drive, and such, even those are supposed to have its drivers installed automatically without any prompting. Either your accessories are old and requires updated drivers specifically from the manufacturer, and is running on compatibility mode (you did mention one of your external DVD drives not working).

To make things easier without all these speculating, I'd suggest a meetup. If you're free, we can do so. In fact, we can do the very first Alienware gathering too. I would suggest Lowyat Plaza itself, specifically Starbucks in Low Yat Plaza, so that if you do need to replace your accessories, you can immediately do it there. Your choice, Michael. Everyone else is welcomed to come and bring their own Alienware as well, but this is mainly to help Michael solve his problem. I already have a request to meet from another forum member that wanna take a look at the M11X personally himself, so this should coincide with that nicely.

If you agree, Michael, we can set it to be on Saturday @ LYP, at the time of your convenience. To the rest, if you do wanna make this a proper meetup/gathering, then we need to set the time and venue (if this does not agree with you), but please do so to accomodate Michael.

Streamlining your M11X can be tricky. I know, I've wrestled with it for the past three days, sometimes without much sleep at night, doing software updates amd downloading patches for my game. I'm the type of person who don't rest until things run smoothly, and thankfully, my M11X is running as what I expected it to be now. The next thing to do is to provide a proper backup solution to it, so that in case something happens, I can roll back to its working state immediately. I've already created a restore point to which it is working properly, so that is a start.

Just wanna help Michael. Sounds like he's in deep over his head with his problems, which should not be since the M11X is ready to go, hit the ground running so to speak, from the moment it is unboxed. I did not even update to any new display drivers, there aren't any, nor are there any other device drivers required for any of its components. Win7 updates are the usual, but should not mess up the system's performance.

Which is why the M11X is ideal, small footprint and does not consume the entire table when ported around.

Starbucks LYN has extension cables for multiple usage. So does Starbucks KL Sentral and Gardens.

On the search for the perfect controller for SFIV. The XB360 wired controller is real easy to setup, in fact no setup at all, plug it in and play. But performing Ultras and Supers, hell, even a proper Shoryuken on that horrendous D-pad is more like performing the motions and HOPE it comes out. In the end, had to play using the analog stick, but that does not offer precision control. The 360 wired pad is PERFECT for racing games though, so GRID and NFS:Shift will be using it.

This post has been edited by stringfellow: Mar 5 2010, 09:47 AM

Pads, not sticks. I need to be portable at all times. If sticks, I already can use the Mad CAtz SF4 Tournament Edition that I have already.

The SFIV edition of those Hori fightpads are reported to have broken diagonals, so Shoryukens and Supers relying on those moves are a toughie. The best I've read are the USB Sega Saturn pads, but finding those are like finding buried treasure.

BIOS overclock is 1.6GHz, your Windows SysInfo is reporting it wrongly. It's 266 with a multiplier of 6, which adds up to 1.596Ghz.

Looks good, especially the d-pad. Unless I can find the Sega Saturn USB controller when I go LYP later, I'll stick with the pain of using the 360 wired pad.

Much better, that looks more like my scores as well. The real test is how your games perform. Try those settings I mentioned, but leave the Framerate setting to "Variable", not "Fixed". Your M11X can handle more than 50fps on that game.

I've resorted to using the analog stick instead. I have better probability of executing my Supers that way.

What about the Mac users? I'm one. MacBook Air owner here. You can be both and not be pushing each other's buttons you know.

Tomorrow or Sunday maybe? I'm only free after 5pm tomorrow, aircon installation at my place. Or free the entire Sunday.

the entire gathering was to help you sort out your problem. Otherwise, we can make it as a general casual get-together kinda thing.

Nope, didn't find any.

I'd rather have a clean look than something that looked plastered on. Unless it covers the entire surface ala BestSkinEver or InvisibleShield, it's gonna look awkward, because it does not have that recessed area housing the screen. And wrapping a gaming laptop with a full-body skin is asking for overheating trouble. Also remember, your laptop "breathes" through the keyboard as well, so even after you turn off your laptop, the hot air will emanate/flow from behind the keyboard, over the screen and out through the slit between the screen and keyboard area, so if you plaster a film there, sooner or later, the adhesive compound will deteriorate, and with the heat, results in the film warping and displacing the adhesive compound over the screen. Sticky, so....not for me.

Reported the two old threads to be closed by any of the moderating personnel to avoid unnecessary bumping of the old thread and encourage using the new version instead.


EDIT:Cheers, DG bro.

This post has been edited by stringfellow: Mar 5 2010, 03:19 PM

Bioshock 2 should not lag. I had mine at High and it ran smooth. I suspect your antivirus is the culprit, the last time I had McAfee it hogs the system resources to itself causing games to to run restrained.

DO NOT REFORMAT! you'll be embarking on a long road to recover this, along with the hassle of installing all the Alienware-related apps after that. Leave it as that, and I'll take a look if you can come after 5pm tomorrow.

It may just that you're running on Intel integrated graphics card that made the video performance that bad. Also, make sure you've cleaned your registry clean of all traces of McAfee, before installing any other AV program, otherwise you may exacerbate things because your system now had to divide resources further to TWO AV programs.

This post has been edited by stringfellow: Mar 5 2010, 08:16 PM

The best way to do an uninstall is via the "Uninstall Program" inside Control Panel, and then further spring-cleaning using CCleaner to clean the orphan registry entries after the uninstall.

Your SF4 performance sounds fine. As for Bioshock, the original Bioshock or Bioshock 2? I can't help you if your game installations are from pirated sources, those alone may be the reason why the games are laggy, missing prepackaged dlls and file modifications are a part of pirated installation. If you are doing it this way, then I cant help you.

Calm down, and at the moment, run CCleaner and uninstall any bloatware in the M11X that you'd never use. I wish I can help you right now, but unless I'm there myself to help you diagnose, I don't wanna risk making your M11X worse.

Excellent work, FF8ong! More benchies, preferably from games that we have not seen before. I didnt realize BFBC2 looks that good!