Gaming Laptop

Alienwear produces some of the best gaming laptops in the industry. Let's consider the new Alienwear Area 51m. This is a design for LAN gamers--perfect to use to battle 40 or 50 other gamers in close proximity. For its purpose as a gaming box, the Area 51m is delightfully, almost freakishly effective. However, there are some drawbacks.

At 11 pounds, this Alienwear notebook is not easy to take on the plane or to tote with you to business meetings. It's designed as a gaming machine--almost a desktop disguised as a laptop. It measures 11.4 by 13 inches, and it drinks up battery life quickly. Informal tests on the machine suggest that the battery may only last three hours, fully charged. You can get a second backup battery for the Area 51m for about $73.

That said, the computer offers an array of riches. It has a 2.4 GHz Intel Pentium IV chip, 40 GB on the hard drive, and an ATI Mobility Radeon graphics chip. Most excitingly, the Alienwear Area 51m's 15-inch LCD is truly state-of-the-art. You can see the individual eyebrows on your soldiers of fortune, and the depth and fluidity of the graphics will awe you--this is truly one of Alienwear's classically brilliant desktop game stations.

System runs Windows XP professional and comes with 512 MB of DDR memory, so you have plenty of power to slog through long gaming sessions. It also features an 8 X DVD or a very effective CD-RW drive. Bear in mind that the Alienwear Area 51m is not cheap and not easy to lug around, but it does feature the company's futuristic, Blade Runner-esque design.