Great solutions for those with the Alienware Area 51m

[TriniVoice]

I have spent about 12months with my Area 51m and I must say that I agree with you guys & girls in that it is a problem child. One of these days I will tell you my alienware horror story. I don't believe that they have the formula for producing a great gaming laptop but they have the potiential too, and I hope that they learn from there customers and spend alot more time in R&D testing.

I have a 16" 1600 x 1200, ati 9700, 1gb ram, 60gb 7200rpm harddrive, windows xp professional.

1. To stop the problem of the laptop not recovering from the suspend mode or you reboot your laptop but the screen remain black.

This is a problem with the ati driver and because of the use of outdated system drivers that came with the laptop. Reinstall windows professional, only install updated drivers from the alienware website for every laptop component except the ati graphics card. Make your own alienware utility cd with updated drivers. For the ati card only use ati driver ver 8.03 or both ati driver ver 7.99 and then ver 8.03. This will all so cut down on the screen freezing up.

2. For those who has the screen freeze up when ever you put in a cd, this happens because of the incd utility, but I would not recommed installing the nero that came with the laptop. Try to get the latest nero 6 that is out now that does not have the incd utility. use the incd removal tool and uninstall nero, then install nero6 without the incd.

3. Try to keep the back of the laptop elevated so that heat could be removed much easily. Also always check to see if dust particles accumulated on the fan grid below the laptop. If so remove it. You see the graphics card has a temperature kill switch which will cause the laptop to freeze up, screen turn white or reboot the laptop, so ensuring that this area is cooled will eliminate this. Where I am in the tropical region I have a fan blowing on it and this works. Heat is dissipated from the cd/dvd burner, heat sink in the back middle, and by the fan area at the back right end.



I must say that I realized that when the laptop is working as it was paid to do, it is a great and powerful machine. I acctually ran Halo @ 1600 x 1200 without problems (it was alittle jerky), NFSU2, Prince of persia 2, command and conquer at their highest resolutions and with no problems.