I bought one of these for one of my boys and an ASUS Gaming Laption for the other. While it is not up the task of an equivalent gaming desktop it allows my 13 year old son to bring it to his friends on the weekend as well as have the power to run the tools for his education and school.
He’s plays a game on the weekend called League of Legends and it links to the LED lights in the laptop to show his health level and all of his friends are in awe of that feature.
I owned an Alienware 17 several years ago and was very disappointed in the quality of construction. While the newer ones look the same, they are light years ahead in quality build. I’m glad I gave the Alienware another shot, I’m a future buyer of there products and recommend them to my son’s parents.
This one did come with a 7200RPM drive and the ASUS was 5400. I don’t think gaming laptops should come with 5400RPM drives because they are so slow but I added a 256GB solid state drive to both of them. They both can hold two drives and I highly recommend this upgrade.
One last thing, this does come with Windows 7. I upgraded it to Windows 8.1 with no problems, there are drivers for all the hardware. I’m a professor of computer science and over the last few months I have been learning the in’s and out’s of Windows 8.1. While I was a hater for several years, I can attest that Windows 8.1 has definitely been a benefit in my family but that’s another review altogether.