So, I've had this Alienware Aurora m9700 now for just over two months—and for the most part, the damned thing has been useless. Here's why.
It's got an aboslutely brilliant screen on it. WUXGA: 1920x1200, and it's clear and bright and everything you'd like in a nice display. The only problem is up until a few days ago, I haven't been able to get my hands on any video drivers for the damned thing. The built-in Microsoft VGA drivers normally work just fine, but in this case, they don't scale all the way up to the screen's native resolution...and so the whole display looks a lot like crap.
Forcing the XP drivers on lets me get all the way up to the native resolution, but then bluescreens every time I try to start a GDI app. That's kindof a problem, since Remote Desktop uses GDI, and I use Remote Desktop a whole crapton.
But today, I finally got real Vista nVidia drivers loaded up on here. Oddly, they're not WDDM drivers (which means despite the serious ballsyness of the graphics adapters, I get no transparent windows) but they don't bluescreen anymore. I suspect it's just the old XP drivers, with a fix for the bluescreen.
Amen. The machine is actually useful now.
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