Home : Hardware : Reviews : Alienware m15x
Presentation
The m15x is a stunning machine. At first inspection, it’s quite clear that no expense was spared to make this unique laptop case. Sleek silver sits atop a sturdy black base, but don’t let the simple colors fool you. The alien head not only compliments the case with a unique design; the eyes light up using a customizable color scheme. This follows through with all aspects of the case’s lighting, keyboard included.
Changing the color for these is simple, done completely through what Alienware has dubbed “Alien FX”, a self explanatory coloring system. With it, there are six different parts of the laptop that can be colored: the keyboard, touchpad, touch-sensitive buttons above the keyboard, the internal and external alien heads, light rim around the monitor, and the Alienware logo directly under the monitor.
Using 12 different colors, each of these parts of the laptop can be colored accordingly. The two alien heads serve a dual purpose, functioning as a display for whether the power is connected or not. If so, one selected color is displayed on the heads; if not, another color is. This allows for incredible customization, so color to your heart’s desire.
Along with the Alien FX system is Alienware’s power management control, named “AlienFusion”, both part of the larger and growing Command Console. Alienware has intelligently decided that most customers are probably buying into Windows Vista from XP, thus giving a simple power management program that doesn’t require navigating Vista’s excessively robust menu systems to find suitable power properties. For more advanced users, it proves to be cumbersome because it’s slow to start up and to make changes.
