Yeah, it's expensive, it's heavy, and it sucks down battery power like it's going out of style. But at the end of the day, I don't care. I'm getting the Alienware M17 laptop. And here's why.

After the jump are three reasons I've decided I love the M17.

First: It's a solid discrete unified slab of a thing built by people who are far better than me at building computers. I can't really speak to its longevity after a week of use, but I can say that it's been built to make me think it will last a long time. A rubberized coating makes it less of a smear magnet than, say, the similarly black and sexy PSP, which wears fingerprints as if they were badges. But this coating also makes me think I could drop the M17 and maybe - just maybe - it will be okay. Maybe. I'm not going to test this, since I'm pretty sure I'm wrong. But it's the impression I get. The rubberized coating even makes me think I could accidentally nudge it into a swimming pool and if I pulled it out quickly enough and got busy with a hairdryer, it would be okay. Again, I'm pretty sure I'm wrong about this. But these are the things I think about the solid and hearty M17. If it were olive drab, it would belong on a Humvee bouncing around Afghanistan. High-end is sexy enough. But high-end and hearty? Now that's sexy.

Second: Even though it's not your conventional laptop, it's no desktop either. It's desktop power divorced from a desktop. I can put it in the back room with my other computers. I can use it in the dining room. I can carry it into the garage and play a movie while I work out. I can bring it to a friend's house or a LAN party. The term "desktop replacement" gets thrown around for good reason. The Alienware has upstaged all the desktops in my house not just because it's more powerful, but because it's more convenient. Any game I can play on my desktop, I can now play out in the backyard on the little table by the lawn. That used to be the exclusive domain of the PSP and Nintendo DS. Now I can play a full-blown PC game out there if I want. That's what you're really getting when you buy this giant ungainly powerful thing. You may not be unfettered. But you're certainly less fettered.

Third: The simple raw power. I can't help but admire the way it can wrangle a tough game into shape without me having to nudge video option sliders. That old dilemma between fast or beautiful is swept away and pretty much any game is splashed up onto a screen of generous proportions in all its uncompromised glory. I have no desire to play Crysis again, but if I did, the M17 sits smugly self-assured that it's up to the task. This is where a real reviewer would run benchmarks and give you lists of framerates with given settings for particular games, arranged by resolution and whether the anti-aliasing is set at 2x or 4x. You'd probably be pretty impressed.

And this is also where you should know about a very important caveat. The M17 is powerful but it's uncomfortably proprietary. It has ATI's Radeon Mobility videocard, but you can't get drivers directly from ATI. Instead, you can only get them from Alienware. And Alienware hasn't offered any updated drivers recently. A few weeks ago, ATI updated their Mobility drivers to version 9.6. The M17 is stuck in the ancient era of version 8.57 drivers.

So it's a bit distressing when games with built-in notification for outdated drivers start sending me messages to the effect of, "Dude, uh, you're running old drivers". That's a paraphrase of the error messages I get when I play Sims 3 and Dawn of War II on the M17. It's a pretty demoralizing way to start a game. "Uh, dude, are you sure you know what you're doing?"

Now I realize this may not be a big deal. For the record, the M17 runs The Sims 3 and Dawn of War II like a dream. Heck, I could probably run them both, alt-tabbing between them at will (there are probably real hardware reviewers who have charts about this sort of thing). But what about a game like ArmA II, the super-ambitious, super-realistic shooter? I can't get it to run well on any of my computers, and that includes the M17. Is it a hardware problem or a game problem? Or, in the case of the M17, is it a driver problem? The last thing I want when I'm trying to deal with something cutting edge and maybe poorly optimized like ArmA II is to wonder if I've got to also worry about a driver issue.

Tomorrow: four of the M17's lovable quirks, including the way it tried to murder my other laptop
(Click here for the previous Alienware M17 game diary.)