Let me introduce myself. My name is Matthew Martin and I have been an owner of two Alienware laptops over the last 2.5 years. I have to apologize for the length of this email as it will detail everything I can recall from my experiences with Alienware. From my searching online, it seems you may have received this type of email before for other customers. Let’s begin, shall we…
I ordered and purchased my first Alienware Laptop, an m9700, on February 28th of 2007. I ordered the machine with XP Media Center with the intention of upgrading it to Vista later on. It sold with Vista at the time, but stated that if the dual video cards options was chosen, only one would be used until the SLI issue with Vista was resolved. The available drive only ran one card. At $700 for a secondary video, that was a bit of money for a paper weight. I expected this issue to be resolved some time soon and waited patiently.
The first problem was with payment options. I ordered the machine using a debit card. The debit card was limited to being charged so much each day. This limit was not imposed by my bank, it was imposed by Alienware. I could not choose to post the charge all at once. I had to call someone to have it charged in completion. This delayed my build by several days.
The Second problem came into play when Alienware (AW) did not include the coax adapter needed to connect the machine to a standard US coax cable. This was handled fairly well, although I had to wait until some were available. I have noticed over all this time that keeping things in stock at AW tends to be difficult. I digress, more on that later.
A considerable amount of time passed before the SLI issue did get resolved and I was happy that I did not buy the machine with Vista outright. Once I heard that Vista was now SLI friendly, I reformatted my computer to Vista using a Vista upgrade I bought from AW. A BIOS flash and driver update and my graphics were sitting pretty. The problem was that the graphics issue would not be the mountain I expected it to be. The problem came in with the sound.
After formatting my computer to Vista, the sound was badly distorted and popped erratically. I, being a fairly competent computer tech with over 13 years of experience, started to look into the issue because I know that drivers can be temperamental, especially on an OS that was known for having driver issues.
In my research, I spent countless hours on the AW forums, across the internet looking for driver alternates, and trying out every conceivable combination of configurations and BIOS settings in an attempt to solve the issue. I received many responses from AW forums (AW-Warner to be exact) except each response read something like,”I will check with engineering and see if there are driver updates or BIOS updates.” Not once did I actually get a response from AW on what Engineering said. Well, maybe once. I knew this would be a driver or BIOS update. I could confirm this by installing the Audio driver from the latest nVIDIA nForce4 Vista driver (which actually was the RC1 release, later releases did not include the audio driver). I tried dozens of drivers and found the nForce4 Audio driver RC1 was the only one that would produce halfway decent clarity (version 4.66 driver to be exact). Aside from all my testing, I also spent 16 hours over the phone. This is not an exaggeration. I clocked it to the minute.
After 16 hours of talking, I was able to send my laptop in to be serviced. In approximately a weeks time, I received my laptop back stating that they had reformatted the machine, replaced the Wireless card and the issue had been resolved. I booted up my machine and did notice that the issue did sound much better. Then I noticed that the SLI feature was disabled and that I was only running on one video card. You know how I feel about paper weights, so I enabled the SLI option and rebooted. Guess what, the sound issue returned.
I promptly contacted AW again and they scheduled me for service again and I sent it off. I fired a blind email to a customer server email address for AW that I figured out by looking at the other AW email addresses. I was contacted a day or two later while my machine was still at the service center. They told me that if the issue returned, which they expected it not to, to contact them and we would take other avenues of resolution. Needless to say, my machine came back and the sound issue persisted.
I contacted the number I was given and spoke to the individual who called me and they proceeded to walk me through returning my m9700 to AW and that I would be shipped a brand new machine which we would configure on the website. We configured a new machine and then I assembled all the items I was told to return and shipped them off. I can’t remember exactly how long it took for AW to certify my return, build the new machine and get it to me. I can confirm that the new machine was invoiced on 4 Sept 09. I could get you more information, except that leads to another issue. We’ll cover that soon enough.
Eventually the new machine, an m9750, configured virtually identical to the old one except for certain components that were no longer available. Those were upgraded to the lowest possible option. I understood why it was done that way and I do not have any issue with that. After receiving my m9750, Things went well and I thought that would be the end of it. I figured that the replacement machine was AWs way of apologizing for their inability to fix my problem. The thing is, accepting one’s mistake includes learning from it. And now, Page 2.
After about 10 months of normal usage, the m9750 began to suffer freezing up issues. The machine would be running fine one second, then the next it would lock up, the mouse would be frozen, the sound would start skipping like a record then silence. I have to kill the laptop and reboot to do anything. No information on the crash could be found in the Vista event logs, or anywhere else for that matter. The lockups were infrequent at first, but increase in frequency as time passed. I noticed other unrelated,but concurrent issues that happened about the same time. Devices on the USB bus would receive reset commands frequently. My backlit usb keyboard would flicker and stop responding to keypresses, the external USB drive would reset and fire up as if it were just turned on. I was not sure if this was related or not to the freezing. I tried various tests to try to narrow it down to one piece of hardware. Due to IRQ sharing and whatnot, I had narrowed it down to the video card or the motherboard.
I started a support question on my personal support site directly to tech support and after a few days, they had determined that the video was most likely the failing part and gave me two options.
- secure a credit card and they could ship me the replacement first and the credit would be released when the old part came back. or…
- send the card back and wait for a replacement.
I was willing to secure the card and request a preship, but the informed me that since the card was actually a debit card, it would be charged, but the charges would be reversed when the old card came back. This was unacceptable as this was not mentioned until the card info was already submitted. I refused this option and decided to send the card in and wait for the replacement. I was told that once they receive the card, it would take 5 business days to return the card before the replacement would be shipped. Why it would take anyone 5 days to look at a card and identify it as returned is beyond me. Remember, I work in this business as a PC technician myself.
I was notified that there could be delays related to parts out of stock. Not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined what that statement gave AW the permission to do to me. Not once have I made light of the fact that this machine is used daily and cannot be down for more than three weeks. The agent at AW did not mention anything about this being a problem.
I sent the card off and tracked it from ship to delivery. I sent it out on a Friday and AW signed for the package the following Tuesday. I was never contacted acknowledging that and days went with no contact whatsoever. As far as I knew, the card could have been tossed in a drain. Communications has always been an issue dealing with AW. I started sending requests to AW through my support site asking for updates as to what was going on. Let it be known that no one could positively tell me anything. No one ever told me they received my video card. It turns out that the video card was out of stock.
Of course, No one could tell me for sure that it was. The best response I could get was, “It may be that the card is out of stock, but we don’t know for sure. We will contact you as soon as we have the parts and ship it to you.” This went on for 5 weeks after AW received the part. 5 weeks. For a Video Card. I suppose AW would have been fine making me wait for an indefinite amount of time for this video card. No on contacted me telling me it was out of stock. I got an email from “AlienWatcher” stating that it had shipped back to me. This process started with support requests from 24 July and I signed for the part on 11 September.
Ok, more to the point. I installed the replacement card and reassembled the laptop and fired it up. Everything went well that night and I left it on overnight to receive updates, etc. The next morning, it was froze again. I was able to turn it off and reboot it again. I was far behind on my work and could not take the time to continue this process. Surely, you can understand my point. After several days passed, I logged onto Alienware to go into my support request area to submit another ticket for the freezing. I received a “Fatal error: Unable to open file” web page with nothing else displayed. This happened from two different computers using the three most common web browsers. The reason I can tell you the exact error is because I still get it today. It has never been fixed. I assume it is just happening to me or other users would’ve complained by now.
I posted a thread on the AW forums about my freezing issue and about the website issue on the 28th of September. As of now, it has been viewed 4 times with no response from AW. After a 16 hour call log from the last time, you can understand why I am hesitant to call again. I have reached a point where I cannot expect anything regarding AW to go correctly. I have been the utmost of patient. You have lost customers because of this, not because I have talked bad about AW, but because everyone who is aware of the facts cannot believe how slow and unresponsive AW support is. Every step of this process has had one problem or another. All my life I have looked at AW to be the epitome of high end. I cannot believe I am the only one you have treated like this.
So here is what I plan to do. I first will wait for a response on this, but do not think I will wait forever. I have waited long enough. I am researching my options and plan to exercise them in a matter of days. This includes reporting to the Better Business Bureau, contacting the press and the media, at the very least blogging about it. I have met several of your customers through my blog. People I would have never met otherwise. I can think of only two possible solutions here. I have spent too much money to let you treat me like this. The m9700 and m9750 are Chinese built laptops that are sold over the world. There is nothing custom or unique about them. The only thing that made them unique in the United States is that AW was the only authorized seller. I know who the actual manufacturer is and I understand why you can’t get parts in a timely manner. Why you can’t get driver updates responsively. Your so called Engineers have not control over this laptop. If the original manufacturer doesn’t provide you with updates, there are none. I will discuss these two options with you upon your response. I suggest you not delay.
… This was sent on 30 September 09 in hopes that Alienware will handle this without more drastic action being taken …