Once a philosopher twice a fool?

My Mx17x R1 is a 14 months old, and has pretty much died. Oh, it still boots (and reboots randomly on occasion), but I can no longer use my dual 260's, my wireless card, some keys on the keyboard, but at least I can make some wicked word documents on it.

Dell support has been a joke (mainly because I'm just outside my year warranty), but even before that it was horrible.

So I rang Dell up this morning and demanded to know why I should buy an R2. The sales person gave me a good deal, or at least a decent one including "north American technical support" (their uber-premimum gold plated support plan) for three years, next day shipping, upgraded drives (2x 500GB drives in RAID0), Windows 7 Professional at no additional charge. This was on top of 10% EPP, plus 15% because the system priced out at more than $3K, plus $375 off (the "free" Crossfire upgrade), making my total less than $3K including shipping.

So I think I got a good deal and the extended supported should address my concerns about the laptop tanking at 13 months but still I can't help but feel I'm making a mistake.

I spent a lot on my R1 only to have it die on me at a really bad time, and now I'm spending a lot again (though not as much as I did on the R1) to travel the Dellware road again.

Here are the system specs:
Lunar Silver (don't want to get it mixed up with my R1)
Intel Core i7 840QM Quad Core Processor
6GB Memory (going to pull the 8GB out of my R1)
17-inch WideUXGA 1920 x 1200 RGB LED (1200p)
CrossfireX 1GB GDDR5 ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5870
1TB Raid 0 (2x 500GB 7,200RPM HDDs)
Intel Ultimate N WiFi Link 6300 a/g/n 3x3 MIMO Technology

 

There's a $100 coupon around. Personally, I think the CPU upgrade cost is too much. Same for the hard drives. You can get a much better CPU for about the same price and HDDs for around 50-$60 each.

 

I priced out the CPU and couldn't find it for cheaper (well at least not from a source I trusted...somehow I suspect the $75 copy on ebay being sold as new wasn't), and the drives were "free" (in the sense I had a 320GB drive and the sales rep upgraded it to dual 500's and asked if I wanted them in Raid 0 or Raid 1 and then he credited the cost to my order), so I don't feel too bad about their cost.

 

Are you sure you can pull the memory out of your R1? That sounds questionable, given how "proprietary" Dell's memory cards are. Also, I personally would (did) go with RAID 1, NOT RAID 0. Your data security is probably worth more to you than the very minor performance improvement (if it's even noticeable at all) of RAID 0. RAID 1 mirrors the hard drive and allows a failed drive to be replaced seamlessly, without any loss. RAID 0 cuts the whole drive system's reliability in half so that any drive failure wipes out the whole system.

Definitely, get the 1900 LED-backlit screen. It's $200 upgrade but well worth it.

 

I havent seen many brands of memory that wont work with R1 or R2 mobos, you should be safe as long as the speed and cas spec is correct.
If you want raid, do a back up and use raid 0. I have used both, well all 3. single drive is about 82mb read, raid 1 was 77 mb read, raid 0 is 138 mb reads. And yes I can feel the difference. nowhere near ssd, but better than single drive. Raid 0 is no more dangerous than a single drive. If a drive fails in either one, then the drive fails. Mirroring is actually harder on the drivers since all the data is written constantly(mirrored), raid 0 writes part of the data on each drive (striped). You will probably lose a video card before a hard drive in these machines.
The 1200p screen is great, but before spending the money make sure you determine if you will be using the laptop display or an external monitor. I always use an external monitor so I feel I wasted some. But if I hadnt bought it id probably want it, lol.

 

"Raid 0 is no more dangerous than a single drive." -> This is not true. RAID 0 with two drives is always half as reliable, statistically, as a single hard drive, because the minimum drive life of the simultaneous pair dictates the life of the drive system. If one ran 3 drives simultaneously in a RAID 0 configuration, that would have three times the failure rate of a single drive, etc.

A single drive's failure rate being "x" means that "n" drives running simultaneously as a system has failure rate "n*x". And with RAID 0, any failure kills the system. With RAID 1, the failure rate is still "n*x" BUT the failure is not total; it's a transparent failure that a drive replacement solves completely.

 

there is an error in your calculation when a drive fails on a signle drive system your replace it reinstal and your ready to go its the same in raid failure wont kill the system unless its the raid controler die

 

There is no error in my calculation. If I gave you a RAID 0 configured system with one million drives in it, you wouldn't like that system would you? It would be failing constantly. The RAID 1 system would have DRIVE failures at the same rate, statistically, but those failures would not kill the whole system. RAID 1 is only dead when ALL hard drives are dead. RAID 0 is dead when ANY drives are dead.

With a single drive, dead is dead, and it happens according to the failure rate of that hard drive. With RAID 0, death occurs statistically sooner, because multiple drives must work simultaneously for the system to be alive. The original purpose way back in the 70s for RAID was reliability. RAID 1 serves that purpose, but RAID 0 is counter to it.

 

If you’re backing up your data, which you should do anyway, RAID 0 is a far better solution than RAID 1. It is faster and you can have a large single drive if you want. Most people will never have a drive failure and not need the redundancy anyway. There are many types of failures that would take out both drives anyway (heat, spilling, dropping or crushing the laptop, fire in your house lol) so it really only protects one single type of failure. Have I had drive failures, sure, have I had them in RAID 0, sure, but not enough of a problem to outweigh the benefits.

Back on topic:
I can’t speak for how good the deal is because I went the cheapest system I could by route (low end CPU, memory, HD etc), then upgraded myself and saved a ton of money. I would say that the issue is not being a fool for buying again, but maybe it was foolish to NOT get the extended warranty the first time. Yes we all learn, and sometimes the hard way. These laptops are so packed with technology that sooner or later some part usually dies. I rarely ever suggest extended warranties, most of the times it is simply a waste. In this case I strongly recommend 2, 3 or 4 years though.

 

While it's true that a RAID 0 configuration is generally less stable than a single HDD, it doesn't mean the system of 10 drives would surely fail the next day.
Each extra drive will only add a small % to the RAID failure rate.
If we assume that 1 HDD has a stability of 99%, then 10 drives in RAID 0 will probably be ~90% stable.
This is a rough speculation of course.

 

Right; it is guaranteed to fail the next day. We're talking about statistical failure rates, not the actual experience of a given user on a given copy of such a system. What is guaranteed, though, is that RAID 0 is statistically less reliable than a single hard drive, and RAID 1 has far higher reliability than RAID 0, though lower performance. It comes down to personal preference, but RAID 0 is not "true" RAID, by the original intent of RAID.

Whenever you have a series system with "n" identical components, the failure rate over a single component is "n" times the failure rate of a single one. With hard drives, modern ones are probably good enough that even RAID 0 is "reliable enough" for most people, and they are willing to pay the price. I just want to be sure they know what that price is.

Sorry, I mean "not guaranteed to fail the next day."

On the Dell support, I don't think it's all that great either. Pretty much it's a bunch of low-paid phone workers going through checklists. They don't really know anything you don't. What's new?

I suspect that you should not buy a computer for its support, since technical products essentially never have good support. How much would the company have to pay to have good support? They would have to hire big-time engineers to just sit and man the phones, and they are never going to do that.

Before I bought mine I looked around, and I just couldn't find anything remotely competitive with the "panache" of an Alienware. Has Dell really done their homework on these systems? Probably not, but anything else is going to be worse. The technology is constantly changing and everyone wants to capture the market, so a lot of stuff gets rushed out when it's immature. Think about it: Shouldn't software updates actually be bull? Shouldn't the product work perfectly and be entirely bug-free the instant it's sold? It'll never happen.

I guess I'm saying that you should go with the "least of many evils", which for now is probably the Alienware 17x.

 

Wow, I look away for a few minutes and this turns into a RAID0 vs RAID1 configuration thread

I'm running my R1 with RAID 0 and have since day one (well day one+how many days it took me to track down the drivers to add the second drive) without an issue. Yes, I backup often and keep most of my production work on my server (WD Black drives in RAID5...another big no-no) which is also backed up. Of all the troubles I've had with my R1, its worth noting that none of them have been drive related. Do I get a huge performance boost out of them? When I used HDTune to test RAID configs after on my server, I found that two 500 GB drivers in RAID0 will outperform a single 1TB drive (or at least those are the results that HDTune gave me when I tested configurations) by a quantifiable amount (of course I wasn't testing drives in my R1, but on PowerEdge server with a cheap SATA II RAID controller).

As for the memory goes, I have two four GB Corsair DDR3 1333MHz SODIMM Memory sticks (9-9-9-24 1.5V from Corsair's website), which works in my R1. If they don't work in the R2, I'll be disappointed, but I imagine I can live with 6GB for a while.

And yeah Voice, I feel like I'm going with the least of the known evils. I could find another gaming laptop (Sager, Malibi, etc.) but is their support really going to be any better? I doubt it, still annoys me. I'll be honest though what clinched the deal for me was extending the warranty to three years, I don't think I'd have pulled the trigger without it.

 

Hope you smarten up and get 3 yr minimum warranty.

Edit - you did. Sorry.

 

@SpecKane,
Don't worry about the RAM, it will work in the R2.
I don't think you will regret your purchase. 3 year warranty is a nice backup to have.
Whether or not you should have waited till CES, is another question.
As far as Sager/Clevo is concerned, no, you can't expect the same level of support. Small resellers can't boast a NBD warranty, but on the other hand, their customers seldom require one

 

Prior to purchasing the m17x-R2 I owned a XPS M1710.

I bought the unit with a 3 year warranty. Three months after the warranty expired, the thing died. Contacted Dell and asked if I could extend the warranty for a further 2 years.

They extended the warranty and sent a tech out who completely rebuilt the laptop (new MB, new GPU, new KB, new LCD) under the extended warranty.

I wonder if this option would be available to you?

 

Yeah that sounds like a win-win. Dell gets rid of some old parts, but you get your computer rebuilt and like new for a few hundred bucks. Eventually if it fails again you could even end up with an upgrade.

 

My M1710 is still kicking the poor old dear.... lol

 

Yeah, mine too. My girlfriend has it now and you should see the hell she puts it through. I do notice that one of its fans is getting noisy now, so it might be on the way out. It never had quite the guts that the M1730 does, and the Alien blows that in the weeds, but the 1710 was a game-changer in its beauty, the lights, etc. I still love the way it looks, and my girlfriend likes it a lot too.

I have vacuumed lots of fuzz out of it many times, as she constantly uses it in bed, throws it all around, spills makeup and food on it, all that. But it's still humming along.

 

good to know mine only had 11 months of hard use really, since then its only just done light duties while my desktops been tied up or play vids for kids lol. Still in pristine nick, Im not going to part with it, but yerh M1730 would have been a lot better... oh well lol Eeeeek at the bed, mine runs pretty warm I wouldnt do that.
Do you have XPS lights mod on it? She'd prob love that if you dont ... Might distract from the nail polish stains too, at least while shes playing music lol

 

I have had some issues but I'm glad I didnt give up because the current system is awesome. And for at least a few months was King of the hill for gaming laptops!

 

Raid 0 is substantially faster, in both seek times and read times. Don't talk as if you know unless you've seen benchmarking graphs.

Back your stuff up, and on the very small offchance that you have a drive failure, replace it and reformat. It's not a big deal.

 

! My R2, which was supposed to arrive on the 17th and was "delayed" until the 3rd is still in production. Today Dell calls me to tell me that they wouldn't be able to honor the promised upgrades to my system (2x 500GB drives in RAID0, Windows 7 Professional, and the three year support) and that they would have to charge me for them.

I told him to off in that case and to cancel the order. I'm already very hesitant to go down the Dellware road again, and the support agreement is the only reason I was willing to do so in the first place.

The guy gets very apologetic and tells me that won't be required, he'll "do what needs done" to get me this system at this price.

Then it proceeds to try and upsell me on the drives to 256GB solid state in RAID0 ($500) from 2x 500GB SATAII in RAID0, to the dual 1GB 285M SLI video cards ($350) from CrossfireX 1GB GDDR5 ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5870, upgrade from 6GB RAM to 8GB ($150), extra power adapter ($120), and extra battery ($180).

Told him if he wanted to throw any of those upgrades in there for free, I'd take them. He said no.

He then tried to tell me how important it was that I upgrade because here I was after a year "upgrading" my R1 to an R2 and this is quite a purchase, and so to avoid "upgrading" again a year later why not get the most out of my order now?

I pointed out to him that the only reason I was upgrading was because my R1 died. It was a piece of crap, I hear him clicking and he says "Oh, yes, I see that now, you called in a lot about your R1. I see. Ok. Have a nice day" and then hangs up.

I have no idea what that was all about. None.

 

How do you manage to break your R1s so easily?

 

Not a clue. Wish I knew, but as far as I'm concered it was pretty standard use (not like I carried it around Iraq or anything, just used it to game from my couch and do a lot of photo and video editing).

 

hmm. Sounds to me like you're dealing with Eurocom . . . . not dell, weird lol.

 

Nope. Sounds like Dell to me, because results can vary for people on a wealth of factors, and just to name a few:

- The type of situation. I.E., if they only want a power cable to be swapped, or must cough up a system replacement; the latter will normally come at the cost of considerable whinging.
- The rep. handling your call; could be someone friendly and nice, or could be a jerk.
- Your own attitude when handling the call. I know I can get taken for granted if I am too nice. I also know that positive reinforcement and tolerance is wasted at times and yields counter-productive results.

 

I just can't do it anymore.

Dell just called to let me know the laptop had been delayed until Jan 20th (or later).

So I told them to cancel it, only to be told they couldn't cancel it because it was in production and that I'd have to wait until they shipped it to me, and then send it back.

A few minutes after that call I get another one, telling me that because my order is delayed, the FTC requires that they let me cancel my order, but gee whiz it would sure be nice if I didn't and that they just know I'll love my laptop if I'll just give it a chance.

Again I told them to cancel it. They guy said he would.

Ten minutes later I get another call from Dell telling me that they can't cancel my order, but that they'll send me an over night return shipping label once I recieve the laptop...

and so it goes.