Which Laptop to choose from?

I'm very confuse right now on which one to choose from. Both cost the same and the only differences are LCD 17" and 15" inch and one comes with Quad and the other with I7.

Should I upgrade:
1) The ram to 6GB or 8GB or stay 4GB
2) For M17x processor to Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme Mobile Processor QX9300 (2.53GHz/ 1066 FSB/ 12MB Cache)

or

3) For M15x processor to Intel® Core™ I7-920XM Mobile Processor Extreme Edition (2GHz, turbo up to 3.2GHz, 8MB L3 Cache)


I'm not much of a hard core gamer but I do wish to have an Alienware for my own.

Please give me recommendations about these two different spec. Any advices on upgrade or suggestions will be taken seriously.


M15x Spec
- Metallic Space Black Base
- Intel® Core™ I7-820QM Mobile Processor (1.73GHz, turbo up to 3.06GHz, 8MB L3 Cache)
- 4GB Dual-channel 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM (2 x 2GB)
- 500GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive
- Slot Load Fixed Blu-ray BD-ROM / DVD + /-RW Combo Drive
- 1GB GDDR3 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 260M

M17x Spec
- Metallic Space Black Base
- Intel® Core™ 2 Quad Processor Q9100 (2.26GHz/ 1066 FSB/ 12MB Cache)
- 4GB Dual-channel 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM (2 x 2GB)
- 500GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive
- Slot Load Fixed Blu-ray BD-ROM / DVD + /-RW Combo Drive
- Single 1GB GDDR3 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 260M


Thanks for all your help.

What do you plan on using the laptop for?
How long do you want to go before buying a new one?
How much battery life do you want?
Is screen size a big factor?
Is weight a big factor?

What operating system(s) do you plan on installing (and is that operating system 64bit)?

Interesting place to post a laptop question lol :p

Well here are a few things to consider:

- amongst the i7 CPU family, only the 720QM is worth its cost in terms of performance. The 820 is only a mediocre 10-15% better(in the best case scenario) and it costs a lot more(something around 300-400$ IIRC), the 920QM is maybe ~20% better than the 820QM but also costs even more. Bottom line, get the 720QM. Don't be fooled by clock speed(1.6 GHz), it thrashes every dual and quad core out for laptops right now. Unless you're running heavy CPU intensive calculations, I wouldn't consider it worth it to get anything above a Q9000 or an i7 720QM.

- 6Gb and more of RAM will not be particularly useful to you unless you multitask but with extremely demanding applications. I have 4 and I can run 2 semi old games at the same time fine(and still browse the internet and play music), so unless you use large RAM eating applications like hardcore AutoCAD, Solidworks or MATLAB, I'd save the money.

- if gaming is a priority(not sure which games you play), upgrade that those graphics. It's kind of odd to see an Alienware(arguably a gaming oriented computer) be spec'ed with high specs in everything and leave the graphics "ok". Get an SLI or Crossfire configuration before you consider a RAM or CPU upgrade for gaming purposes. If yous ave money where I pointed above,y ou should have enough to redirect towards the GPU(graphics processing unit).

Amongst the 2 configurations you posted, the m15x is better simply beacuse the CPU is better, but overall the m17x has the potential of being the better machine(since it can hold SLI & Crossfire GPUs).