Software Evaluation
One thing we pay special attention to on system and notebook reviews is the software – does the vendor load the system down to a point that the average user will notice a slow down and be unable to remove the bloatware or is the system clean and sharp out of the box?
At first boot the desktop looks clean and barren – just the way we like it!
Looking at the System panel we see that Alienware decided to go with the 32-bit operating system rather than the 64-bit for some reason, even with 4GB of system memory and 2GB of addressable graphics memory. I am hoping that this is fixed for all future models.
The 600GB VelociRaptor RAID 0 array and the single 1TB storage drive are shown here and I am glad to see only 12GB of the primary drive is in use!
A look at the device manager shows everything as it should be…
Obviously with a system like this the Windows Experience Index is going to be maxed out – 5.9s across the board.
There really isn’t much to see here and that is really what we like – a system that comes from the vendor without the bloated, pre-installed software that we are used to seeing on retail systems responsible for really slowing the out-of-box experience quite a bit.
There really isn’t much to see here and that is really what we like – a system that comes from the vendor without the bloated, pre-installed software that we are used to seeing on retail systems responsible for really slowing the out-of-box experience quite a bit.
