Alienware Sentia

Alienware has always been known for high-end PCs and laptops with an edge. Now, however, it's going for the business set. The company's first ultraportable laptop, the Sentia, is uneven, but worth considering.

The Sentia doesn't leave behind Alienware's boutique pedigree. A stripped-down but highly portable notebook, this 3.5 pounder includes some interesting features. There's an instant-on DVD player, a stowaway USB thumb-drive port, and a one-touch battery-saving feature. It's ideal for those who already own wireless cards, don't play 3D games, leave the Excel forecast models to the accounting department, and generally just use a laptop for e-mail and surfing the Web.

As an Internet device, the Sentia is a step above a PDA, but that's meant as a compliment. This black-and-silver system is light enough to carry in one hand, yet includes a DVD drive for watching movies, and a four-in-one card reader.

If the system is off, you can click the P button to enter a partitioned Linux mode that loads PowerCinema in about a second, and lets you watch movies without actually booting Windows XP. Our only complaint is that while using PowerCinema, you can't adjust the widescreen display to fill the entire screen, so you'll have to live with the letterbox bars.

The 12.1-inch screen uses ClearView LCD technology, and you can see the difference easily enough: Movies look especially bright and clear, even from an angle. Photos and Internet sites popped off the screen vividly, but the 1280 x 800-pixel resolution is almost too finely detailed for the small LCD.

The keyboard is too small and the mouse trackpad is too jumpy. The left and right mouse buttons seem to either stick or not respond intermittently. If the keys had been just a bit larger, our typing would have been much more fluid.

Interestingly, the Alienware Sentia includes one hidden USB 2.0 port in addition to the easily accessible USB 2.0 ports on either side. Slide open a cover, and you can fit a slim flash drive underneath the Sentia's keyboard. Unfortunately, if the USB key is a bit larger (such as the SanDisk Cruzer) you'll have to use a side USB port.

The hidden port is also a great place to stash a Bluetooth USB module, but we would have preferred built-in Bluetooth. There is an Ethernet and modem port for a wired connection to the Internet, along with 802.11g Wi-Fi.

Performance on this sub-notebook was predictably slow. Older games, such as Battlefield, ran fine, but newer 3D games, such as Doom 3, were entirely unplayable. The Intel Extreme Graphics chipset and the underachieving 1.8-GHz Pentium M processor are to blame. We couldn't even get 3DMark2001 to run.

It became apparent that the Sentia is underpowered in the multimedia department when we tested a downloaded movie from Real.com. During playback, the movie stuttered constantly and paused occasionally over a 3-Mbps connection, mostly due to the poor video and CPU speeds.

On the other hand, the Sentia is a fine productivity machine, at least for a little while. Its PCMark score of 3333 puts it in between value systems like the Averatec 6240 we reviewed last month and PC Laptops' 12-pound K-2 987, reviewed in this issue. Unfortunately, the Sentia ran out of gas after only two and a half hours.

The overall value of the $1,955 Sentia is questionable at best. We do like Alienware's support and its knowledgeable customer service, but WinBook sells the same system, its X540, for $200 less. Overall, the Alienware Sentia is more about the brand, the customized case, and the fact that this portable notebook makes a decent partner for Internet surfing than anything that requires too much power or endurance.