Sorry to burst your bubble, but Alienware is the most over-priced piece of shit out there. Dell just load the computer with average hardware and bump up the price for no apparent reason. You're better off purchasing one of their awesome cases (I admit they look absolutely fantastic) and building your own custom PC. Also, it's pretty pointless to buy a Alienware if you don't game.
Not since 2006 (last iteration of the PowerPC), Macs use Intel hardware now, same as you'll get on a PC. They are pretty, but now that its possible to run OS X on a PC (with carefully matched parts and changes to the kernel, you can build yourself a Mac clone for much, much cheaper. Really the best way to do it is to build your own computer. It's not that difficult, and there are many, many forums to help. If you prefer to purchase an already built computer, now is the best time to do so. The market is in a horrible (and most likely sustained tumble) slump and there are many sales out there. If you don't mind the small form factor of a netbook, I highly recommend one. I've got an Alienware laptop, a Mac Pro, and several more PCs, but find myself constantly on my MSI Wind netbook ~70% of the time. It's funny, I purchased this Wind mainly to tinker with and mod it (RAM upgrade, BIOS boost +24%, OS X, etc.) but I find myself using it for almost anything not gaming related. Easy to carry it around as well. I recommend the ASUS 1000HE, purchased one for my wife, and she loves it. Great buy for less than $400 through Amazon, battery life on it is amazing.
Allienware laptops are rebranded Clevo/Sager ones. But you can buy a Sager or Clevo in far more configurations than you can the Alienware ones - Alienware has 4 models, Sager has like 10. Last time I looked at Alienware's site, it transfered me to Dell's site to do the configuration and they offered Dell parts (like 256G SSD drive). And it's not pointless to buy a gaming PC or laptop if you don't game. It does everything extremely well, from playing videos to reading from the hard drives. My next laptop will be one and I won't play games on it at all.
Also, I was talking about desktops not laptops. If someone buys a laptop to game then there's seriously something wrong!
I don't know if you've already answered this question, dpc, but what would you be using the computer for? Will it involve gaming? Graphics works (Photoshop, Gimp, etc.)? Web-browsing? Word processing? That will help us find the right sort of computer for you. For mouse, I'd suggest the Logitech G5 as it feels really comfortable and you can adjust the sensitivity on the mouse instead of going through Control Panel. You can't really go wrong with a 19"+ LCD monitor and just use the stock keyboard. Make sure you purchase a motherboard that allows DDR2/3, SLI, and PCI-e as this will allow for upgrades in the future and will be better value for money. Get at least a gig to 2g's of RAM (make sure it's compatible with your mobo), and try and see if you can afford an nVidia 8600GT--It's really reliable and runs really smoothly. I highly suggest custom building your computer as you'll save a whole shit tonne of money. Most hardware comes with its own individual warranty so you'll be fine. As long as everything is compatible there should be no reason for anything to short out.
I think Macs are way overpriced and inferior hardware in a sexy package. They offer one laptop with WUXGA at ~ $3K that has lower end CPU and memory. It costs $1K for 8G of RAM. For that ~$3K you can get a Sager laptop with 2.66GHz quad core CPU, dual SLI nvidia cards, 80G fast SSD (Intel, about 200M/sec read and write), 2 more internal 500G 7200RPM drives, blue ray DVD drive, 6G or 8G of RAM, and a 1920x1200 resolution screen. Most of the mac laptops run 2GHz or less and have tiny screen resolutions. I also agree about building your own system. 2 years ago, I built a pretty slick system for under $1K. 150G Raptor 10K RPM drive, 320G 2nd drive, 8G of RAM, quad core Q6600 processor @ 2.4GHz (and overclocked), near top of the line nvidia card at the time, SLI motherboard, case with 600W power supply. It rocks at games, scores 5.0 on the vista speed tests, etc. And that was 2 years ago. You can do a lot better today for the same bucks.
I run Ubuntu. It is 64 bit OS and can use all 8G. It caches the disk in whatever memory you don't use, so it's really fast after you use it a while. The raptor drive feels a lot faster at launching programs. Plus I run XP in a virtualbox virtual machine, giving it 3.2G of RAM; it runs XP faster than if I installed it directly on the machine (because of the disk cache).
Actually Alienware PCs are not that overpriced. I pieced out the same unit I had them put together for me and am really only paying about a $100 premium. I was shocked when I did it because I always thought that I'd be paying way more for one of their rigs. The key is to getting their basic build. When you upgrade the RAM, HD, CPU, PS, and/or GPU is where the price starts spiraling out of control. To upgrade from 3GB to 6GB of RAM it was +$200. Hell I could get 12GB of DDR3 from Newegg for $160.
Then you must be looking at overpriced hardware in general. If you purchase AMD and ATI (not Intel and nvidia--Also overpriced) you will most definitely get a computer that's half the price of an Alienware rig.
Just to clarify, I totally agree with your statement on the Macs. FWIW, from my experience and others across several forums, the Hackintosh builds not only run OS X "better," but are more stable as well. Unless your totally sold on a Mac appearance (which you can just about mod and emulate yourself), I see no reason to buy a Mac. For those who wonder what I'm talking about, here's a common Mac clone, the "Macbook Nano." It's really a modded MSI Wind. BTW, in the process of doing another build. I'll probably wait for Win 7 & Snow Leopard release though(SL to see compatibility of components). Core i7, dual Raptor in RAID 0+1 (considering SSD, but have heard they don't stripe well for some reason), the works.
Half the price and half the performance. I'm talking about cutting edge parts. Intel i7processor, GTX-295 GPU, DDR3 memory, 1KW power supply, Liquid cooling, etc. You can't build one like that at half price off of Newegg or any other discount retailer. Trust me, I tried. I did get my 23" 1080p 2ms response monitor from Newegg for $150, compared to $300 or whatever Alienware was offering. And I did get 6GB of DDR3 memory from Newegg for $80, compared to $200 for the upgrade at Alienware. I will be waiting to get a Raptor drive when they get around $150 instead of spending the $300 fee from AW. If I wasn't going for a gaming rig, I could have built a very nice rig for about $500, but I decided I'd future proof my rig so I won't have to upgrade for at least another 5 years.
I read Intel is not going to make the I7 for much longer. It's too fast and too cheap for their liking... I'd rather have an 80G SSD for $350 than a 300G raptor for $300. It'd fit nicely in a floppy bay. You can get any old big hard drive to store your mp3, videos, and less often used apps. The Sager I mentioned has I7 920 CPU.
From what I've read, there's going to be two more iterations albeit "slower" than the 940 and extreme model. I don't know why anyone would buy the 940 anyways, just an OC'ed 920. I'm still on the fence about SSD, I'll probably wait at least another year to purchase one. I'd like to get at least a 100 GB (to hold the OSs and Steam games), but the price is just exorbitant for now. The companies recommend no defrag's, and yet they slow down when you start to cram more stuff on. For all the other files and media, I've got a NAS box.
There's no seek time to speak of, so a fragmented file system wouldn't be a big deal. And it certainly wouldn't thrash while loading up a bunch of startup applications at boot time.I'd think defragmentation is just a bunch of needless writes that shortens the life span of the drive (you can only write to it so many times, albeit a big number of times). On a linux system, I would think swap would be harmful to the lifetime of the drive, as would windows page file writes. So those should be turned off. I'm not sure that the fuller an SSD gets the slower it gets, but I'd expect it to slow down for writes as it was more used. They try to spread around the data written evenly so the same part of the flash isn't written to most of the time. Erasing flash to reuse it is slow, so they defer doing that and try to write to unused flash. Once all the unused flash is gone, it's got to do that slow erase operation.
