I bought an Alienware M18 laptop last year as a present to myself. I've wanted one since I was a kid and I finally had a job where I could afford to make that dream come true. If I had known what I was in for I would have bought something else.
I am a professional tech, I've built computers and servers, worked advanced application support, admin, some network stuff and now work in security systems engineering. Suffice to say I have some experience with the industry and maintaining systems. I have worked with Enterprise level Dell a fair bit, I always find them to be pretty excellent. I knew going in that consumer level, even for a premium brand like Alienware would be different. I didn't realize it would be soul sucking.
I ponied up approximately $4,000 for my machine, maybe a little foolish way to spend money but I thought I was going to get quality and support at least. Within the first three months I had experienced unreliability due to overheating issues. Forced reboots from thermal buildup after watching an hour of TV on it or playing a game, god forbid I try to run a file server without the thing force crashing when the server was connected to. I found this high-powered high-end machine completely unreliable for anything beyond basic tasks my 7 year old lenovo refurb can handle.
There support kind of fixed the heat issues, well they logged in and couldn't see anything except some application logs for reboot. They fiddled with drivers and called it done. It also took hours to get them on the phone and deal with it. It drove my girlfriend insane the number of hours I had to spend trying to get them to fix the machine. Eventually after months of tolerating the issues I tried again. This time the person decided to replace the video card.
They sent out a contractor tech, nice enough guy but he has no loyalty to them or the job. Hell he was asking me about how to get a 'real computing job' while he was there because he was an engineer who was doing this part time to make ends meet. After he left there were new and exciting issues including screen artifacts and a continued heating problem.
This time they had me send it in to the depot. Over two weeks later I get the machine back with a note they replaced the System board this time. The entire time it was in the depot I received no updates. Despite the promises of their staff I had no idea what was happening or how long it would take, and this was a supposedly expedited/escalated issue.
At this point I wrote the CEO of Dell, Michael S. Dell a certified letter because I had no idea how to get answers or proper servics. I eventually had a call with some senior escalations person from Dell who started the call by quoting metrics on how Dell is the best in the world and insisting that they had fulfilled the terms of there warranty and that I had nothing to complain about. I had requested that they extend the warranty without charge due to the numerous issues I'd experienced in the first year (the warranty is about $300 per year to extend, which obviously is a necessity given the instability of the machine), I thought this was a reasonable request given the utter lack of quality and stability of a machine that was supposed to be top-of-the-line on the consumer side.
That was in October, I received my machine back early November and realizing Dell did not care one whit about my experience I resigned myself to having learned a shitty lesson and just having to buy the warranty extensions at the end of each year period so I could continue to use this $4,000 dissapointment.
Then today both my video cards failed to be detected. After about 2 hours of troubleshooting everything myself, praying it was just some BS driver corruption or something, I resigned myself to calling Dell for yet another major component replacement. Their agent attempted to have me connect to a remote session URL that I knew was not correct, I humored them and typed it into my browser and of courser it was caught as having an invalid certificate. I asked the rep twice that this was the URL he wanted me to go to, I then explained it was showing to be a hijack site and asked for a supervisor.
I have now owned this machine for not quite 11 months and I have had a video card replaced, the system board, now am going to have both cards replaced again (and likely the system board again), I have been unable to use the machine reliably beyond browsing, email and text editing for at least 1/3 of the length of ownership and have gone through every absurd, frustrating, and outright insulting experience with alienware premium support you can imagine. Oh and I didn't even write about the time it took them 120 hours to get back to me about a simple BIOs issue.
TL;DR If you are looking to buy a premium gaming laptop/ultrabook/whatever DO NOT BUY ALIENWARE. A lesson I shouldn't have had to learn, don't make my mistake.
Submitted November 26, 2016 at 02:18AM by VeritasAbAequitas http://ift.tt/2gI5ErA via TikTokTikk
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