I've never been a huge fan of Alienware stuff, honestly. It's like the buyer is paying out the ass for the ability to say they have an Alienware and r0x0r teh 50x0r5 off everyone at the LAN party. Except, after 2 minutes, everyone's moved on -- but the buyer's bank account hasn't
I just finished diagnosing a problem with a friend's Alienware, as a matter of fact. And I wasn't that impressed. It turned out the thing needed a new power supply. Now, I'd expect something like a PSU failure from a $35 500watt no-name power supply, but from one used by Alienware? For a $1700 computer, I would expect better than that. Another problem I noted with the thing, was weight. That mofo weighed a TON -- I'd be willing to bet that case has more armor than the LAPD (and this complaint about weight coming from a guy who built his current rig into a 5U rackmount server case.) Which makes me wonder if a person would even want to bother dragging the thing back and forth from a LAN party or whatnot. Inside it wasn't anything impressive either. P4, A gig of RAM (4x 256mb sticks), a higher-end videocard (can't remember the exact model), SATA HD, Audigy something-or-other, etc. Basically a pretty solid build -- but nothing I couldn't compete with on a home-built rig at half the price (I just built a NEO4 PCI-Express/Athlon64-Venice/2x80GB SATA/6600GT box for a couple ticks shy of $700.)
I suppose if one has the money, they might as well spend it as they wish -- I just wouldn't spend it on Alienware stuff.