Take a quick look at the specs for the Sentia m3400, and then its price tag, and you could be forgiven for walking away and buying something else. The Pentium M, as we know, has been superseded by the Core Duo and even the Core Solo, so is well on its way to the bargain bucket before being put out to stud. For a brand such as Alienware, this is a little unusual – but the Pentium M 760 that it uses is a long way from useless.

What you probably won’t notice from just looking at the spec list is that the hard drive inside the m3400 is no ordinary unit. In almost all hard drives, the zeros and ones that make up your data are laid out in a longitudinal manner. This is the way hard drives have been ever since IBM first worked on them over 50 years ago. Within the Seagate Momentus 5400.3 inside the m3400, the bits are laid out perpendicular to the discs as opposed to along it.

This may sound extremely trivial and about as significant as an increase in 1MHz of clock speed. But by using perpendicular technology Seagate has managed to provide a high capacity of 160GB in a 2.5in drive. If that wasn’t enough for you, another benefit of perpendicular drives is that the data stored on them is more secure. In a longitudinal hard drive the poles of the magnetised bits abut each other, plus to plus. This can lead them to switch polarity, from a 0 to a 1 and vice versa, rendering your data useless. In a perpendicular drive the poles of the data sit plus to minus, so this isn’t a problem. This means that the data on your drive is at less risk of being corrupted.

Game on?
The Alienware brand is associated with gaming, but you won’t be playing the latest and greatest with the m3400. The display is a mediocre 14in widescreen powered by the 915 chipset with 128MB of video memory. For the price, we would have liked not only a bigger screen but also discrete graphics with more memory.

There are plenty of other laptops that meet these criteria and cost less. So why isn’t this the case with the m3400? As with every brand, you do pay for that name and styling. With the m3400 you get the usual striking case design with the ridged back to the screen and the blue LEDs shining through the alien face.

And as for the screen itself, it’s adequate, but nothing out of this world. In fact we were rather unimpressed with the poor viewing angles on offer. The question you’ve got to ask yourself is: are you willing to pay for the design? It certainly does make a change from the majority of faceless, grey or black plastic and even aluminium notebooks. To us though, this isn’t enough to explain the price hike.

From using the m3400 we noticed that after extended use it does get very warm on your lap. The fans inside also emit an annoying whine much of the time. After five minutes it was unbearable, when an hour had passed we were eager to turn it off. Having said that, the m3400 turns itself off after a couple of hours anyway.

In our DVD playback benchmark it recorded a paltry one hour and 52 minutes. For a machine designed for portability, it lacks the legs of its competitors. Yet even when it has juice in the tank, the m3400 fails to compete with other laptops on the market. Even taking into consideration its outdated platform, we would have expected a significantly better SYSmark performance than the 166 marks recorded when benchmarking. Compare this score with the latest Core Duos that can be had for less than this, and you’ll really need to want the alien insignia in order to justify the price.

The mouse control buttons, which are made from stylish aluminium, are actually so hard to use you wont want to. When you’re paying this much for a PC, this isn’t how it should be. It’s good that the m3400 uses the new perpendicular technology, but soon all new PCs will do the same. This alone doesn’t make up for the fact that it costs £1,300 and uses a technology that is rapidly becoming obsolete. When you buy something, no matter what it is, you don’t want it to be old hat the minute you get home. We’re not saying that everything you buy should be bleeding edge – if that was the case we would all drive Formula One cars – it should be at least as new as possible though. For the money you can buy so much better and you should, even with the free T-shirt.