Some people aren't satisfied with a plain old laptop. There's clearly a market for PCs branded with glowing aliens and rubber fins, because Alienware, a company renowned for its high-price, highspec systems, is filling it. You expect near-perfect build quality when you're being asked this much for a PC, especially if its real gimmick is the styling, but you don't exactly get it here.

The rubberised lumps on the rear of the screen start off aesthetically pleasing, but a week's use left our lid developing visible damage on the corners. There was also a noticeable gap between the bottom of the LCD panel and the monitor bezel.

Despite construction issues, the design is effective enough to win back some points. At 2.7kg it really isn't that heavy for a machine of this size and power, and even the AC adapter is fairly light. It has a tapered base, which sits the keyboard at a good typing angle and every port is exactly where we'd put them in an ideal world, accessible and usefully situated.

The graphics performance, like the styling, can't really be disputed. The GeForce 6600 Go is about as close to the desktop range as you're going to get. Coupled with the 15.4-inch LCD panel, which has a pleasing response rate in practice, there's a good visual combination on offer.

A distinctive feature, rarely seen until now, is the external VGA switch. Boot your machine with this in the off position and the internal GeForce chip is denied power, meaning the machine uses the motherboard's on-board Intel 915 graphics instead. This might seem like a pointless exercise - why would you deliberately want to cripple your PC's graphics capability? Well, you could equally argue that having to supply the juice for a high-power graphics card is a complete waste of your battery if you're only going to be typing a letter.

The feature isn't hot-switchable, so you'll need to reboot to change your configuration, but the improved battery life (an extra half-hour according to MobileMark testing) is worth the small hassle, and the 915 is good enough if you're not playing games. 512MB isn't really enough RAM, though, and the machine tends to struggle if pushed too hard.