Browsing a couple of preinstalled VMWare OEM images and found an Alienware Windows XP install, I was curious to see what an XP install would have looked like from Alienware since this would have been before the Dell acquision. Since this is a preinstalled VMWare images all I had to do was extract and import it into VmWare Fusion.
A successful boot up, surprisingly we have not triggered the Windows XP activation. The install appears to be a late generation XP install as wee have Service Pack 3 and DirectX 9c included.
A look at the My PC Information file on the desktop, this contains customer name and account information that I’ve blanked out to stop any possible privacy issues. This goes though the configuration of the laptop as it left the production, and shows the results of the various different benchmarks
125fps in Doom 3, that’s good for a laptop from this era. It appears this laptop is based off the Clevo D900T design, who are a common OEM for laptops for uncommon brands like Medion, Advent, Time/Tiny and RM (Research Machines). Acer/Samsung also did this and are such examples of such OEM’S that sell hardware designed to be rebranded.
Dual optical drives? That’s very rare for laptops in 2006. Makes you wonder how often both were utilised.
For a lot of PC’s of this era, it was common to see dual optical drives since one would be the DVD-ROM drive and the second being a CD-RW drive. DVD-R drives that could also write to CD existed for laptops at this point, so I’m unsure why they didn’t go for that approach instead, unless you wanted to burn a CD whilst you watched a DVD movie.
A look at the different checks that Alienware go through before the system is shipped, I wonder if they still do this when Dell took over? (Maybe, since there is no sign of McAfee, or any antivirus for that matter)
CyberLink PowerDVD – Designed for the playback of DVDs but also various video files. Also features a screen-capture feature to save screencaps of content.
Alternatively you could use Windows Media Player 10 instead which came bundled with Windows.
Nero also comes included to copy and burn CD and DVD’s, there is a few components included for multimedia playback.
Nero later developed into full media center software to compete with Windows Xp Media Center Edition.
This can also function as a DLNA media server, to share content with the consoles and set top boxes of the era. This actually still works with modern stuff like smart speakers or smart TV’s. Useful since Windows XP did not have support for DLNA media sharing unless you installed the Windows Media Player 11 Update.
Lastly, A look at the system properties box with the Alienware branding.
Overall it’s a clean install with a few multimedia software packages included. I’m surprised about the lack of game demos since this was designed as a gaming laptop, a few demo’s of games of the era would have been a good way to demo the graphics capabilities of the notebook.
Download – Works in VMWare Player or Fusion
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