If you are going for an alienware laptop which I highly reccomend for gaming, then get the m17x and not the m15.

Erm...DarkJak.. 8 pounds isn't heavy... but I don't think I can out it on my lap or something (also the hard drive is 1 Terrabyte!?? wow..)

I heard that was heavy? (they said 20 pounds am I getting mislead?)
EDIT: It was 13 pounds...still not for lap sitting but I can put it on my study table.

It's 12.5 pounds, if i'm not mistaken.

Also I heard that the Alienware M11x can use the powerful core-i series mobile processors
now, is that just the i5/i7?

i wuld honstly do what hamster said :]

Go for mac if you want to pay almost 2x more for the same hardware features, just because its cool and trendy.
Example: http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs.html
$999 for a dual core @ 2.4Ghz, 2GB of DDR3 RAM @ 1066Mhz, GeForce 320m with 256MB, and a 250GB HDD...

But if you want to spend your money on a rather conscious deal, then for less than $999 you can get a much better laptop with Inter Core i5, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a neat gaming ATI Radeon HD 5000 series, and 320GB or even 500 of HDD space.

Example: http://www.pcmweb.nl/hardware_review.jsp?productid=4401, thats 649€ or 785 U.S. dollars

The Asus laptop you posted was nice, but the one DarkJak posted looks better

Of course its better. Its $1799 too... I was just showing you how even the cheapest Macbook is overpriced concerning its hardware features.

I have the M15X, the battery life is about 2 hours with the 6 cell, not good for school? You could get better hardware for the same price by buying a different brand. It's pretty big for school, and like my friend brought his to school which is just a normal laptop, then I brought mine they were like lolwtf thats big. Both were 15 inches. It does run games good and I got the minimum specs at the time which were the IntelЎ Core™ i7-620M 2.66GHz (3.33Ghz Turbo Mode, 4M cache) and the 240 GT graphics card. It'll run most games on high settnigs and then real high quality games on medium or low. All I'd reccemend getting is the 260 card, it's way better than the 240, so I've heard.

Lol yeah, REALLY unfair comparing it to something double its price. Even custom vs prebuild pcs can't compete like that!

There is a slightly cheaper model that gives up the second hard drive and the blu ray for about 200 bucks less. Also on newegg. I think that is closer the the Alienware you were considering?
I'm willing to bet that the alienware doesn't have blu ray though (I'll be damned if it does)

Sidenote: Seems like ASUS is starting to become my go to manufacturer for noncustom laptops XD MSI has a few nice ones, but they don't seem as big (as a company)