Comments on: How To Prevent Getting Screwed by Alienware

By: Jim S

Jim S — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 17:05:53 +0000

I’m on my third Alienware computer. I bought my first when the company was in startup mode, great computer, good support. Second Alienware, good computer, fair support. This last computer bought 2 years ago, poor computer, non existant support.
For all their claims about thoroughly checking out your computer before it’s shipped. Mine arrived without the secondary hard drive being formated, and basic hardware needed to be updated, even though the updates were months old.
Every time I called support about a problem, I was told to update the motherboard bios and reformat the hard drive. I ended up finding solutions on my own.
I bought a three year warranty, and my video card has gone bad, it’s been three weeks and they still have not shipped a card. Their excuses range from, supply problems, (huh?) for a gForce 6600 or 6800, to ‘we have to have the card shipped to us for extensive testing and then we ship it to you.’ YEA RIGHT…..
Needless to say, this is my last Alienware computer. I will take the premium price they charge and apply it to a class to learn to build my own computer.
My .02…..
AVOID ALIENWARE LIKE THE PLAGUE

By: dan todd

dan todd — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 08:26:28 +0000

I wish I hadnet bought an Alienware now. My alienware is overheating and shutting off. I think its the graphics card. I have spoken with alienware for over 2 months on this problem, and their tech support is terrible. WORSE than terrible. I have had a tech guy sent from them… he couldnt fix it. I sent it back… TWICE, and they sent it back broken. no kidding STILL BROKEN from their tech department. I want to throw this out the window. DONT BUY ALIENWARE!

By: Todd

Todd — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 09:59:56 +0000

I have a voodoo laptop which overheats and shuts down. Have purchased the Voodoo warantee which they refuse to honor. They play the game of having you pay to ship the notebook to Canada and then run up a bill and claim it is a software issue which of course is not covered under the warantee. Then they completely reinstall Windows and send it back. Funny thing is it still overheats and shuts off.

By: JesterXL

JesterXL — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 20:46:18 +0000

SAW, I posted this article October 1st of last year. As of this comment, it’s now June 27th of 2006 and there is an update.

Her majesty has some hardware guys at work. They took it in to see what they could do last weekend. Apparently, the extra hard drive Alienware sent me, plus the other 2 drives are just fine. The problem was the keyboard was fried. Apparently it takes 3 days for a Dr. Pepper spill to saturate the circuits enough to f it up.

Had they just taken the laptop back, they wouldn’ve known the beep was not the laptop, but the keyboard key enterally pressed beep. I’m not a hardware guy, so didn’t recognize that for what it was, but her majesty’s friend at work did. After removing it, straightening out some harddrive pins, fixing my jumper settings, and testing with an external keyboard, she works fine.

The keyboard is about $100, and won’t be made for much longer. We’re letting him keep the $80 extra hard-drive (pluse another small gift) as thanks and compensation.

So, apparenlty the laptop lives again, and Alienware tech support, while the ladies and gents I talked to are nice, have no f’ing clue how to remotely debug your problem. The fact that you had yours actually sent back and then sent back to you broken removes any faith that they would of found the keyboard problem had I managed to get them to take it back.

In the end, I’m glad my wife can play Counterstrike with me again, but like you, I’ll never ever do business with Alienware (or Dell for that matter) again. I hope things work out for you positively, bro! Good luck.

By: SAW

SAW — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 20:35:26 +0000

I concur 100% with Jess regarding Alienware. I’m currently in a battle with them over the exact same laptop. It’s currrently back at the repair after I sent it there the first time and they returned it not only not fixed, but also missing a hard drive. I don’t have a lot of confidence it will be fixed when I get it back. I’m not sure about your issue Jess, but one of my hard drives was bad from day one and there is some kind of problem with booting from a cold start. I was instructed to reformat and reload Window to the remaining good hard drive and everything seemed fine. But after it was shut down for a few hours I restarted it and got ‘Operating System Not Found’. I hope the repair guys read the note I enclosed with the machine.