I used to have a little tiny laptop called a Jornada. It was large enough that it had a usable keyboard and small enough to be eminently portable. It used flash memory, so it would boot up almost instantaneously. And it got plenty of looks in a coffee shop. You know the looks. Out of the corner of my eye, I would catch real people considering my Jornada. I would even get comments.

"Excuse me, I'm sorry to bother you, but can I ask what that computer is?"

And not just from tech geeks. Yeah, I've even met chicks using the Jornada. Well, chick, singular. And by "met", I mean she asked me about the Jornada while she was waiting for her boyfriend to bring over her latte. So there's that.

So I figured I'd take the M17 to my regular coffee shop and see how it played.

Read about our excursion after the jump.

The first step was getting the M17 out to my car. My next door neighbor is a stuntman, so he's pretty fit. He played one of the mercenaries in Lost. The two of us had little problem getting it into the trunk of my car. But once I got to Starbucks, it was a bit more challenging. Thankfully, the barista had one of those dollies they use to roll boxes of coffee and whatnot in and out of the store near closing time to let you know it's time to leave already.

Alienware calls the M17 a laptop, but that's a bit misleading. You'd have to have one heck of a lap for the M17. It's massive. It weighs 112 pounds, give or take. I had to sit at the table for handicapped people, the one with four chairs. Even then, I was blocking the little counter where they keep the sugar and milk. People couldn't get by. I had to angle the M17 slightly to give people room to squeeze through so they could fix up their coffees.

This isn't really a system designed to be carted around the real world. A LAN party, sure. Over to your buddy's house for some head-to-head Dawn of War II, or to go online to play Call of Duty together. That's fine. Assuming he's got a generous dining room table. The speakers are really sweet and the screen is plenty big, so it's great if you want to watch a movie but your wife is doing Wii Fit in the living room. Just make sure you're near a power outlet, because a rig this big draws a lot of power. You're not going to make it through The Dark Knight DVD while you're unplugged. Battery life isn't much more than an hour when I'm playing a game.

The CPU is an Intel Core 2 Quad. By my math, that's an Intel Core Eight, which sounds pretty good. I'm sure you can find a real hardware reviewer who's posted graphs about how impressive that is. I'll just say that I'm tickled with how fast Windows Vista boots up. It can't be the 3 GBs of memory RAM pulling all that boot-up weight.

So there I was at the coffee shop, trying to quickly play a few rounds of Plants vs. Zombies before the battery ran out (there wasn't room in the trunk of my car for both the M17 and the power brick, which doubles as a footstool when you need to reach the top shelves in your kitchen). As I played, I got looks all right. Oh yes I did! But not the sort of curious admiring looks I got with my Jornada. The subtext of those looks was, "Why look at how small that computer is! Isn't he clever?" The subtext of the looks I got with the M17 was "Is he compensating for something?" Needless to say, I didn't meet any chicks.

Up next: If you have to ask, you can't afford it
(Click here for the previous Alienware M17 game diary.)