In the Lap of Luxury

The 9440 is billed as a portable workstation. And work, work, work it did. I multitasked a Chicago blues audio stream from Radio 365, a video clip from Sprint, the Snakes on a Plane movie trailer, "Rockstar: Supernova" audio and video clips my editor forced me to sample, a couple of Microsoft system upgrades and several dozen fat multimedia marketing Web sites for an industry prize I was judging.

The only slam? The 9440 is all work and no play.

It's dull. For $3,500, I expect some flash. The machine is the tech equivalent of hauling to London, commissioning elite tailor Steven Hitchcock for a one-of-a-kind suit and then getting the thing done in a poly-wool blend. What's the point?

On the other end of the DR PC scale -- way on the other end -- is the Alienware ALX.

Sporting a 19-inch screen and nearly 20 pounds of working weight, the ALX is the wooly mammoth of portable computers. It's the biggest I've seen since we rolled desktops around on dollies back in the day.

The ALX arrived in a slick black box the size of quarter cord of wood.

Inside was not only the computer, tucked in a sleek velour bag, but a luggage tag; a Razor diamond mouse; a key chain; a performance mouse pad with storage tin; a pen; a black, button-down Oxford shirt with logo; a six-cubic-feet backpack, also in black; surround-sound headphones; discs; and a very spooky manual, a la area 51.

The ALX is the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Champion of computers -- there seems to always be room to stuff in another feature.

It comes with not one, but two, very fast video cards.

It has a state-of-the art Advanced Micro Devices 2.5 Ghz processor and plenty of other go-fast features.

The ALX boots faster than most personal computers. And though I felt goofy doing office work on the ALX, I loved the raw horsepower: it was a bit like taking a Corvette to drop off the kids at school.

But if office work was pointless on the Alienware, game playing was not.

"Call of Duty" ran as smoothly as any good gaming computer. Rendering was near TV quality. Game play was fluid enough to make you forget you were on a computer. And the machine's excellent keyboard and mouse made the game an extension of your hand. Honestly, the Xbox is so passe.

Games did rock, but rock did not. Multimedia is not the ALX's strong suit.

	Alienware Aurora mALX

The audio quality fell solidly into the PC category (read: awful). And though the ALX's screen has as high resolution as better displays, the device doesn't handle video cleanly.

Everything from old-school Errol Flynn DVDs to latest-generation high-definition content could not hold up to even a basic DVD player paired with a good display. And at these prices, it should.

Now, neither I -- nor you --- should be daunted by the prices or bulk of these machines. If raw processing with a bit of mobility tossed in is what you are looking for in a PC, get one.

But not even $5,000 can overcome that both these machines are still laptops -- little more than exercises in compromise.

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