Review: Alienware Sentia m3400 notebook computer

Alienware is well known for its ostentatious gaming desktop computers. The Sentia m3400 may not win the hearts of hardcore gamers, but it's a well-designed, stylish notebook.

The Alienware Sentia m3400 uses a 2GHz Pentium M processor and a generous 1Gb of memory. It also employs a clever trick of slowing down to save battery life when less power-hungry tasks are happening.

This is indicative of Intel Centrino technology, which the m3400 uses, but we expected a lot more than the two hours of battery life achieved in our tests.

The Intel Extreme graphics are integrated and can share from 8Mb to 128Mb of system memory, depending on the severity of the task in hand. As mentioned, hardened gamers will want to look elsewhere for their polygon fix but for most Windows tasks, the m3400 works fine.

The 14in widescreen display has a maximum resolution of 1280 x 768 but, using the VGA port on the back, a second monitor can be added for dual-display.

The 150Gb hard disk is impressive for a notebook and compares very well against similarly priced desktop systems.

The front of the notebook has a memory card reader for Memory Stick, SD and MMS cards. There are also ports for Firewire, SPDIF, network and four USB sockets. On the right of the notebook is a multi-format DVD writer and on the back are VGA and S-video outputs.

The keyboard is comfortable to type on, if a little clacky and there are three hot keys for launching email, internet and Windows Media Player.

Unfortunately the trackpad is very uncomfortable to use. The buttons look very stylish but they have to be pressed very hard and it is not long before this leads to a sore thumb. On the positive side, the right edge of the trackpad works as a scroll wheel.

There's Wi-Fi and a butyl-in webcam. No mouse is supplied but there is a gaming mouse mat with two different surfaces to get the best from an optical or laser mouse. A small clip comes with the mat to stop the cable snagging but this won't make the integrated graphics work any better.

The stylish looks are not just confined to the physical appearance of the notebook but also to the look of Windows. The AlienGUIse Theme Manager is be used to radically change the appearance of the Windows desktop and Windows Media Player.

The most useful part of AlienGUIse is its option to minimise and open a window from the title bar rather than going down to the Taskbar. This has been part of Apple operating systems for some time and is very useful.

The themes are very sci-fi so may not appeal to all but there are others that can be downloaded.

Windows Media Player 9 is installed rather than 10, which is a little odd but 10 is available through Windows Update

The software selection is average although not every piece of software was installed onto the notebook. Our test machine had an auto e-mail checker, CyberLink PowerDVD for playing DVD movies, a copy of Nero for creating CDs and DVDs and Microsoft Works 8.

There's no denying the Alienware Sentia m3400 is a portable notebook and at 2.5Kg, it's light too. However, the price tag doesn't represent the kind of value seen with other notebooks of this power and size.

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