In a land not very far away, there came to live A BEAST! Yup, the Alienware Area-51 M7700 arrived today. All 12+ pounds of it, and that's not including the 2+ pound power adapter that showed up last week. If I thought Josh's Clevo D47v was big, this thing is what it turned into all grown up, and JUICED!!!
And yeah; its goin' to be a project. In the words of the immortal Shrek to Donkey; it's like an onion, there's layers. In this case, I believe there'll be layers of problems.
First off, it powers up, but not always, and it wouldn't go into BIOS even when it did POST. Turns out that the little white bar that holds the keyboard ribbon cable in the socket is missing. That would probably explain why that it only POST sometimes AND even when it does, it doesn't necessarily respond to the KB! Secondly, although I new that there was no hard drive(s), I found out immediately that the caddy, and the cable/connector thingy is also missing....DRAT. When it does POST, it seeks the RAID driver and then the OS as well as tries to boot to the optical drive which is all very good. Also on the positive side, it has 1.5Gb of RAM populating 3 of its 4 sockets, so all I need is one more stick of 512Mb DDR2/PC4200 to max that out (read cheap...as in already have).
So, now comes decision time. I've located a local person who has an identical one for sale that has video problems, but is complete....down to the Alienware "Respawn" restore disks. I've got him to agree to $150 for the whole thing, so the quandry would be:
- Go cheap- get a cable/connector/caddy costing somewhere in the $50 range and try to rebuild with a direct Windows XP load, OR.....
- Go big- buy the guy's machine knowing that every part I do AND MIGHT need will be there, plus the restore disks from the manufacturer and spend 3x that much....but knowing that I could probably get the difference back by selling all the parts that I don't need
In the mean time, I've loaded up a few pictures of my X300 (Beauty) as compared to its Alienware stablemate (the Beast).
