Optical/external audio out - What is the real scenario?

I simply dont understand. Everyone of you seem to be content with the motherboard replacement. Are you telling me that once the motherboard is replaced your are once more able to use your optical/external audio output jack without causing the problem to reccur?

If I were you I would just insert the Toslink over whatever it is even with the bare motherboard. And make the engineer call for a new motherboard repetitively once he fixes the motherboard and it doesnt give sound output to speakers.Do this until it gets into their thick skull.If every single person simply just does this and repeatedly forces Dell to initiate motherboard change..then we could perhaps finally force Dell to do something about this.

How many times will they keep changing motherboard until the decide to issue a new replacement or fix the mother freaking board or IDT software? Is it such a mind boggling affair for Dell to address? Maybe it is something more serious that what it looks like ...who knows? Its very strange they havent addressed this.

And what about those who received laptops recently in the last one month.Has there been any complains? Those with replacement motherboards may have a higher likelihood of still having this potential problem because it may be a refurb mother board. Not a new revision etc.

Finally....are there anyone out there in Notebookreview.com who have used the optical/external audio out put and NOT SUFFERED FROM THIS PROBLEM!

ANYONE! Is this affecting 100% of all Alienware M17x R3 productions? If you are just accepting a motherboard with the potential problem that akin to Dell covering your warranty with another defective motherboard. Why would you accept that solution? Thats unethical of Dell and amounts to deception.

This also mirrors the same solution the gave for various systems suffered due to Nvidia GPUs failing after sometime due to bad die material in 2008/9. There was a massive litigation initiated against Dell. Dell had to pay out to the customers in US. But to the rest of the customers worldwide they simply added 1 more year to the warranty specifically for failure arising from the GPU failure.

However their solution for those notebooks within warranty was to simply replace the motherboard when the GPU fails. And these motherboards had the same batch of potentially failing GPUs as well.

I am not surprised that they are doing the same now. After changing the motherboard, are you expected never to use the optical output jack? Is this the solution from Dell.

Where are those Dell people who always hang out here in Notebookreview. Perhaps some of you in the states can fax an explicit detail of this matter to the corporate office.

Seems like Dell is consciously ignorant and adamant in refusing to solve this problem because they hope most customers wont use it and also people will get fed up and never use these jacks.

I think they dont want to declare the problem because there will be a massive recall to change motherboards. But why are they not changing the design if this is a matter of stuck pin or faulty jack and preventing further cases. This is called cheating when you know your motherboard is defective and yet you push it for sales.