So I was contacted by a PR representative for some company who asked me if I wanted to test an M17. I didn't let on at the time, but I had no idea what exactly an M17 was. I knew what an M16 was.

And I knew what an M18 Hellcat was.

So I figured an M17 was something between the two. Perhaps a massive bazooka or maybe a fixed gun emplacement. It sounded fun either way. I enthusiastically agreed. Imagine my disappointment when it showed up and it was only a laptop computer.

After the jump, I begin my week-long fling with Alienware's high-end gaming laptop.

As you may have figured, I'm not your normal hardware reviewer. I wouldn't know a benchmark from a burn-in test. But I know PCs because I know PC games. For well over ten years, I've been building my own computers so they can run the latest games. It's a never ending process. Swap out the videocard, get new memory, upgrade the CPU, and then finally get a new motherboard, at which point you do it all over again because all your other components are outdated. Somewhere along the line a hard drive fails and three or four power supplies burn out.

So when the Alienware M17 arrived, I basically blew an entire day just installing stuff. And not in that "oh, jeeze, this is something I have to do" way. It's like buying a new car and looking forward to your commute. With a new computer, every install routine is a delight. Every new icon on your desktop is the promise of a game that might run better than it's ever run before! Every visit to a game's video options screen is a treat. Bump those sliders up! Let's see what this baby can take!

Alienware's angle is high-end components. When the M17 arrived, it was the eighth computer in my house. It easily outclassed everything else I've got. That's not sayibng much, since even my newest systems are a year and a half old. But what a delight to jack up the graphics for Dawn of War II, The Sims 3, and Left 4 Dead.

The M17 comes standard with an ATI Radeon Mobility 3870. But this one, tricked out because it was being sent to a reviewer, had dual cards in ATI's CrossfireX configuration. It's the equivalent of nVidia's SLI configuration, whereby you plug two videocards into a computer and they work double duty to run the graphics. It's like putting two hamsters in a wheel. They may not make the wheel run exactly twice as fast, but they'll give it some extra kick. So I'm sure if I were running benchmarks, I could point out how much faster The Sims 3 runs thanks to the dual cards. As it is, I just know I can max out everything and I'm still happy with the framerate. It'll be a couple more days before I throw something at the computer that it can't take. Oh, and there's the driver situation to keep in mind.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Right now, we're on day one. This is a week-long game diary about my first seven days with a high-end laptop. Tomorrow, I take her out into the wild. I know she's sexy enough for me. What will other people think?

Up next: The M17 in the wild