dell posts

A few days ago we reported that Dell's Alienware unit had launched a teaser site for a product announcement that would be made the first day of E3. Now it appears some more clues as to the nature of the announcement have been found in the forums of Notebook Review.

The message boards have posted up an shrouded image of a dark but very impressive (on the surface) laptop along with the alien writing. Someone did a translation of the writing and came up with this:

The sum of the first four primes
denotes a state of two parts
known as the gentleman's muscle car of 1967
when pure, it will carry a yield strength of 7-11 mpa
is always empty in zero sum games

Okay . . .that was helpful. In any case we have less than 5 days to find out for ourselves.

[Via Engadget]

E3 2009 seems to be bringing back at least a few PC hardware companies. Intel and Nvidia are listed as exhibiting on the show floor and Dell's Gaming unit (that means Alienware) is also listed as showing up at the show. But there's evidence that Dell-Alienware are prepping a major E3 announcement.

Alienware recently sent word about a new web site called www.allpowerful.com with a Flash-driven animation set up, alien letters and countdown clock that will run out on June 2. That just happens to be the first official day for E3 2009. You can sign up to get a email notice about whatever it is they are planning to reveal. Until then, we watch and wait.

PC makers have to deal with the slowdown in the economy like everyone else and Dell is no exception. The company has already announced plans to cut down a number of its workers. Now it appears that its gaming PC division Alienware (which Dell bought three years ago this month) is gearing up for similar layoffs.

ExtremeTech reports that in a memo sent to Alienware employees the company will shut down manufacturing plants in Miami (where Alienware was originally founded) and in Ireland. Alienware PCs will now be made in previously established Dell plants. A number of Alienware workers will also be laid off although exact numbers have not been revealed. Oddly enough, Alienware also plans to expand the reach of its PC brand in the near future to 35 countries, in part because of its merger with Dell.

Okay, no, not quite, but no collection of hideous headline puns that juicy escapes us. The news from Nvidia's neck of the woods is that the Green Eyeball Gang has gotten a bit cozier with both Dell and Apple this week.

For gamers, this certainly doesn't suck on either front, especially since there's a rather tasty bit in the Dell-centric press release that says, "the Dell Studio XPS 13 eliminates the typical notebook compromise between performance and battery life by offering two GeForce GPUs to give users the option of running one GPU for longer battery life, or combining both for greater performance."

SLI? On MY laptop?

To quote the great Federation philosopher J.L. Picard, "Make it so." (h/t to one of my WoW guildies, from whom that line was shamelessly appropriated). Admittedly, the benchmark figures cited (Futuremark and, the not-precisely-cutting-edge 3Dmark06) are a little bit cherry-picked (they're anything but apples-to-apples). Light snark aside, there's certainly no shortage of interest in having a potent but portable rig, especially if your budget dictates that you're going to have to choose either a desktop, or a desktop replacement.

The PC Gaming Alliance has been officially formed for just under a year and now the non-profit organization devoted to the PC gaming industry has just relaunched their web site. The new site will be a resource for promoting the industry with articles written by the organization's members.

For example the site currently contains articles on why Capcom decided recently to join the PC Gaming Alliance. There's also an article from Dell on how PCs are beginning to enter the living room and being hooked up to big screen HDTVs. The group has also launched a new blog for news updates and more about their efforts.

Dell made some noise last year about perhaps transferring most of their gaming oriented PC business to their Alienware division but at CES this year Dell launched a new gaming PC that's all about having AMD inside. The Dell XPS 625 desktop PC supports the so called AMD Dragon platform.

That means the PC has the newly released AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition processor alongside two ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics cards in CrossFire mode. AMD's own OverDrive program also allows for overcloking the processor as well. Pricing for the new XPS 625 PC starts at $999 and it's available now on Dell's web site.

People are wondering what will the future of PC gaming will be in the next few years. The head of the PC Gaming Alliance, Randy Stude, seems to think that the future could see PC rigs that could allow for console games to be played on those systems.

In a new interview over at GamePolitics, Stude states, "The guts of every console should tell you that the capability is there for the PC to act as the central point for all the consoles. If you bought a PC and as part of that equation you said, Okay, when you're on the phone with Dell, "Hey, Dell, on this PC, this new notebook I'm buying, can you make sure it has the PlayStation 4 option built into it?"

If that sounds like a fantasy rather than a real prediction, Stude disagress, saying, "[Sony is] certainly not making any money on the hardware. I mean, can't they create a stable enough environment to specify that if Dell's going to sell that notebook and say that it's PlayStation 4 [compatible] that it must have certain ingredients and it must meet certain criteria? Absolutely they could that. Are they going to do it? I don't know. I predict that they will. I predict that all of the console makers over time will recognize that it's too expensive to develop the proprietary solution and recognize the value of collapsing back on the PC as a ubiquitous platform."

So, your computer has done something very, very, comprehensively, unquestionably bad. Unbootably bad. Now what? If you bought a system from HP or Dell or one of the other big players in the OEM PC market, you might be tempted to reach for the System Restore Disk (CD or DVD) that shipped with it to resurrect your moribund system.

A word of advice here: Don't.

Late last week gaming PC company Alienware teased its customers on a major new announcement. Today the company revealed what they were hinting at with the announcement of their new M17 gaming PC notebook. The 17-inch display notebook has the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300 mobile processor and is the first Alienware notebook to support ATI's Crossfire graphics set-up with two ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 cards inside.

Alienware's press release states that their M17 notebook can be configured with a Core 2 Duo processor, Crossfire and 3GB of memory for under $2,000. Of course you can go all out and get one configured with up to 4 GB of memory and 1 TB of hard drive storage via two 500 GB drives in a RAID 0 set-up. Obviously this is a desktop replacement notebook rather than one that would be used to do extensive travelling with.

The gaming-enthusiast division of Dell, Alienware, has always been good at generating hype for its products. Now emails are going out with this above teaser image that seems to indicate a major new product announcement that will be officially announced on Monday.

Alienware has always been a major gaming PC maker, even before Dell purchased them in 2005. A few months ago, a Dell spokesperson stated, "We are going to invest like crazy in product development, design and engineering to propel Alienware as the premier gaming brand in the future." Is Monday the day we will get some concrete info on those efforts? Stay tuned.