alienware laptops plagued with problems?

I bought 3 years ago a m15x laptop and had many issues with the case hinge breaking near the screen and the command center lights not working properly. Every time I sent in the laptop for repair, it would take over 2 months to get it back. I vowed never to buy an alienware again.

However,

Now that I've seen the m17x r3 and the unbelievable good price it goes for, alienware has once again sparked my interest. I have seen a lot of people writing about issues they've had with their m17x and the battery not working, and I'm wondering if dell/alienware has improved the quality of alienware products, or if they are still plagued with problems? I'm not really interested in buying a laptop that is in the shop for repairs 50% of the time!


thanks for all your responses! the more the better!

 

I remember that M15x hinge bonanza. No, there hasn't been anything that widespread and blatant since that. Not that I can recall anyhow. You'll be very happy with an R3, or even scoring a more powerful R2 at a good price.

 

Well if you are fearful of bugs and build issues, I'd let the M17x-R3 mature for a few months before purchasing. Dell is good with fixing most issues in a timely manner but some still have issues with the R2 no battery charging problem or the M11x hinge issue. That's why we buy warranty I guess lol.

 

It why when i spend 4k on a laptop i get the 3-4 year warranty - Dell does a decent job of supporting thier products under warranty

 

i spent $3300 on my m15 and was extremely disappointing with the warranty service as well as the quality of the product. I'd rather buy from a different manufacture and not worry about the quality. I was hoping that the issues I experienced were due to the transition period of dell taking over alienware and the fact that i had a brand-new design. I think your right about waiting 3 months to see if people have problems, but I would assume the case for the r3 is the same as the r1 and r2 right?

Also just cause they have a good warranty program, doesn't mean I want to have to use it every 3 months...


I'm really interested to hear people's personal experiences with their own alienware laptops!

 

The battery charging isn't that big of a deal. It happened to me once in 6 months of use. Besides, power drain seems to fix it. I am very happy with my m17x(-R2). R2 had quite a few problems at beginning (I was actually thinking of returning it), but it was all sorted out, more or less quick - it took forever to make the touchpad actually useable.

m11x hinge.... that's not so easy to fix as a simple power drain, mainly because it's a design defect (so yeah, hf extending your warranty at ridiculous prices).

I don't get all the hype about R3 though. You could get (and probably still can) get R2 with a single card for a decent price too. R3 is missing, imo, the best thing R2 has (RGB LED screen) and instead has some gimicky 3D thing with glasses. It seems companies try to push this "3D" thing every 10 years or so? I remember seeing movies from 70ies with "3D glasses".

The customer support is pretty bad. But I hear it's actually better than e.g. Lenovo. The warranty is OK, they'll generally replace anything that's wrong with the laptop.

 

I, too, suffered (and am still suffering) from the m15x hinge issue and am looking at the new M17x's. My m15x has had a motherboard replaced (warrantied), a hard drive replaced (warrantied), and the hinges eventually broke (about a month after warranty was up).

Couple things to note. Its not just Alienware that is plagued by silly problems with their laptops. If you look at any of the high end/gaming laptop manufacturer's sections on this forum they all have similar problems. Seems like its near impossible to bring out a top end gaming laptop without lots of issues. Keyboard lag, sound popping/buzzing/etc, case problems, BSOD's, BIOS requiring updates that sometimes make things worse, updating the video BIOS, figuring out wonky video drivers, etc.. these issues seem to plague all gaming laptop makers.

I'm not sure if its a matter of trying to do too much with limited parts or what. Whats weird is if you look at laptops that are 1 tier below top end, yet still very powerful gaming laptops, there seems to be 75% less issues.

My biggest recommendation is to buy an extended warranty when you buy a gaming laptop. I wish Dell offered 2 year warranties as 1 year isn't enough and 3 years seems to be too much (by then the hardware is old and the laptop is about worthless anyways).

The new M17x's seem to be very durable. The problems seem to be pretty well worked out by now. The R3 seems pretty decent and cheap but I'm personally worried about the weak video card. I've also read on NBR that the the R3 uses a smaller case which makes me wonder if Alienware compromised the case integrity and we might run into hinge problems again. I plan to wait a few more months, if I can bear it, to see what happens. If Alienware starts shipping the R3 with more powerful video cards, or if they release the rumored M18x with more powerful video cards and at a somewhat affordable price. The R2's are really nice but, as ridiculous as this is to say, I really don't like spending that much money on hardware that is now a generation old. The video cards and now the processors in the R2 are both a generation old. They are still very powerful, but if I'm gonna spend that much money I feel like I should buy the latest and greatest in order to extend the duration that my laptop stays relevant and performs well.

 

awesome comments guys! keep em coming! I love reading everyone's own personal story about their alienware purchases

 

(Quote) UNREAL 25:

I don't get all the hype about R3 though. You could get (and probably still can) get R2 with a single card for a decent price too. R3 is missing, imo, the best thing R2 has (RGB LED screen) and instead has some gimicky 3D thing with glasses. It seems companies try to push this "3D" thing every 10 years or so? I remember seeing movies from 70ies with "3D glasses".

Well said! I laughed for a min about what you said "It seems companies try to push this "3D" thing every 10 years or so? I remember seeing movies from 70ies with "3D glasses"." I loved the movies from 70-80's, it is soo true!!!

Back on topic with the OP: My first AW was the M17X R1 (in my sig). If it weren't for the faulty mobo (NV 730i chipset) I would have kept it because it was nice having hybrid SLI. Due to the faulty mobo I was issued the R2 in my sig (thanks warranty) and I have to say that Dell/AW renewed my faith. I love this Beast and the phenomenal RGB LED! I have had this system for 6 months awwready and it is still as fast and as powerful as the day I recieved it. No problems with the mobo like in my R1 and the beast eats up everything I throw at it. It cools efficiently and the highest temps I've seen is 82C (GPU) and 65-70 (CPU) all stock at full load. I don't bench and I haven't applied the new pads and paste I recieved from OCZ yet so I have to say after 6 months of extensive use (I'm a student-gamer) that this machine performs flawlessly. I will admit that majority of the games I play do not support CFX so I disable it and the games run as if it were in CFX. Some games I play are: Crysis and Warhead, Metro 2033, L4D 1&2, Aion, Fallout 3 & New Vegas.

 

The build quality of the Area51 m15x (which i guess you are talking about) is not one of the best Alienware ever did.

I own both (among others), it's a completely different league.
If you compare it to the M17x-R2, it really shows they seriously worked on it. I believe the build quality of the M17x-R2 at least is excellent.

I'd wait a bit though with the m17x-R3.
There are always risks for early adopters. It's nice to have state of the art equipment, but you will also be the one coping with early issues which have not been discovered yet.
Also the R3 looks like at least a partially new casing compared to the R2, but i can't 100% judge that as i have not seen one irl yet.

 

My setup and the date I got it is in my sig. I've only had two issues with my laptop since I got it, and they were very very small ones.

1. Battery charging issue. Found this to usually be that the adapter was just slightly loose. Pushing it in usually fixes the problem (I only get it maybe once every few months...so it's happened 2-3 times). I don't use the battery anyways, unless I'm draining it intentionally.

2. I had an issue where the laptop would not shutdown/reboot without being forced. This is a Windows 7 issue and there's a hotfix for that.

Otherwise I've never been more pleased with a piece of hardware. I play Crysis, Crysis: Warhead, NWN2, WoW, Batman: Arkham Asylum, COD:BO, FO:NV, and god knows what else (I'm getting near to 100 games in my library in Steam, it's a bit frightening actually). Needless to say I'm pleased.

As far as the R3 goes....I think it's a gimmicky joke. 3D in the state it's been for the past 30 years is just...bleh. It hasn't changed much at all. Not only that, but you give up the second GPU and get fudged into a cruddy plastic chassis. No thanks,..

 

Thats not bad.. My list of m15x problems was something like this:

1) Audio popping when I first got it. BIOS update fixed this.

2) Keyboard lag was real bad. Alienware claimed they were working on a fix. For a long time they were talking about testing new keyboards and they thought they had a fix and were going to send beta keyboards to people. What ended up fixing it was turning off some trackpad features via a recommendation of a member on this forum. I believe it was suggested that the problem was related to the USB bus on the motherboard being overloaded.

3) The hinges creaked and felt weak from day one. Alienware had claimed a few times that this issue was fixed long before I bought my m15x. I figured "The only people who break their hinges are those idiots who don't know how to take care of their laptops. My hinges won't break, I'll just be very careful". Little did I know! I was very careful and my hinges still ended up breaking.

4) From day one my game performance seemed unusually bad. I suspected a hardware problem so one day I sat down to run tests. Memtest, video tests, chkdsk, etc... They all came back great. I was pretty confident I had a bad motherboard. Called Alienware and a couple hours of me telling them it was my motherboard and them wanting to remote connect to try and update drivers later they finally decided to send me a tracking number so they could take a look at it. Low and behold they replaced the motherboard and shipped it back and everything was fine.

5) One of the biggest reasons I bought the m15x was I wanted a little more portability. I bought it a few months before a trip to California and I wanted to use it while I was there. I dreamed of sitting in internet cafe's drinking latte's and playing games. Well, I used my m15x several times on the flight down there. During the flight, during the 2 hour layover, everything was great. Got to California and my hard drive had died and the machine wouldn't boot. Had to call Alienware tech support and they shipped a drive to my house 2300 miles away and I never got a chance to use my m15x while I was in California for a week.

6) About a month after the default 1 year warranty ran up, my hinges finally broke. They were starting to go and I didn't want to be without my laptop so I didn't get it warrantied. Figures Murphy's Law would kick in a month after the warranty ran up. At the time the problem was still pretty new and there was a few people suggesting using epoxy to glue the nuts in place and that would fix the problems. I did that, I followed all the instructions, and it didn't work for me. Now, 2 years later, there are people selling reinforced screen bezels on Ebay for $125ish, but its not worth putting that into my 2 and a half year old laptop.

7) At some point in 2009, Nvidia stopped releasing retail video drivers for notebooks. They only release "Verde" reference drivers now. I tried updating my drivers but of course Alienware had stopped releasing drivers for this machine, and the Nvidia ones reported a Code 43 "the device has reported a problem and stopped working". I thought for a very long time that my video card was dying until recently I discovered a post in the Alienware section that everyone with the m15x is having this problem. So to add to my terrible lifeline with my m15x, every game that has come out since mid to late 2009, I've had to run unoptimized drivers while playing it. I guess my performance is nerfed 10-20% while playing current games just from drivers alone.

8) I forgot to mention above, the latency problem that this machine has always been plagued with. Its a known problem that the m15x's have a very high latency when you run DPC Latency Checker. I don't think a fix for this was ever found.

9) At the time I bought my m15x.. after they had been out for quite a while (maybe even a year already), Alienware still only supported running 32bit OS's. They would sell you 4GB of RAM, but you could only ever use 3.5GB of it (and you had to take into account VRAM takes from this number too). So that was fun for a while. Reinstalling your OS is a real chore too. Theres a very specific method you have to go through in order to get all your drivers and your lighting systems to work right.

After all this.. I hated Alienware for a long time. I felt like I had been screwed. Then I realized there are a few other manufacturers (like Asus) who have just as many problems with their high end gaming laptops. But yet, you go into the MSI or Sager/Clevo sections.. and nobody is having these types of problems. Why?

Anyways, I'm kind of ashamed that after everything I've been through, I sort of want an M17x now. I'm seriously considering buying one. I was looking at the G73's but man they have a lot more problems than current M17x R2's do. It seems like Asus is in their "m15x" stage.

 

I just got an R2 last month, absolutely love it. I had the battery issue come up the other day, but just flashed the bios to 09, so we'll see if that helps, if not it really isn't a big deal as you just pop the battery off then on while plugged back in, takes 2 seconds, and it's not like I run it off battery much anyway.

Plain and simple, this laptop is a beast and easily the nicest laptop I have ever owned.

I always had problems with Sony's and vowed never to buy them again, the Asus ROG's feel and look really cheap and generic to me, plus there are countless stories of major issues with them, ie keyboard not working. The HP Envy 3D caught my attention, but the graphic card is weak, and they have the heating issues like the big HP laptops, I had a DV 9000, and loved it, but it got super hot, and only cost me $1300.

To me, when you are getting ready to drop $2000-3000 on a laptop, it better feel heavy duty, and the M17x does, it's incredible. If I was you, I would skip the R3, and get a super up R2, you will not be disappointed.

 

the more i hear about the m17x the more i get excited and interested in it. 2 questions tho for all you m17x owners:

1) Is it portable at all? Or does it just weigh as much as a bag of bricks lol

2) Also, whats up with this fancy screen on the r2 vs the boring plain one on the r3? Is it that superior? I dont know much about it so any info is cool.

I would like my laptop to be somewhat portable and thats why im considering the new macbook pro when they update the innards in april. It'll have a solid state drive and hopefully a decent video card. On the plus it will only weigh around 5 lbs and have a battery life of 6+ hours. On the negative, there is NO comparison with the specs and fps i would get with the alienware.... tough choices ahead!

 

M17?...portable?...[hysterical laughter]

 

We don't know much about the screens on the R3 yet, other than that they are all limited to 1920x1080 according to current information. This is a little disappointing to most of us used to 1200p. They also use WLED instead of RGBLED which in my experience doesn't have quite the same color gamut nor is it as clear, but as I said, none of us has actually seen what the R3's screen looks like, much less with the 120Hz. It might actually look good.

I doubt it though,.

 

From my own experiance every laptop manufacture has some issues. I have has my HP replaced 2x now and still having some issue with it. My Alienware is the best laptop i have ever purchased. I hae had a problem or two with it but Dell fixed it right away and even sent a tech to my house to fix one issue.

A few words of advice, if you are going to buy one DON'T buy it on line, order over the phone you will save money try this link for help with that. http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/456885-aw-dell-ordering-advice-how-save.html. Also don't buy a solid state drive from them. They are way to expensive, you can get one after market for cheap and they are a easy to put in. Lastly Most M17x are not that 1" portable Mac junk. They are a gamming laptop there is really no way to make one that is light with the parts that are put in the moster computers.

In my own personal opinion I will never have another computer with out the RBG screen i even bought a new one for my wifes desktop because she cried how much "prettier" my screen was than hers. It is totally worth having.

Hope this helps!!

 

It's still portable though, I actually think it feels great on my lap when I'm on the couch. I bought an extra ac adapter, so don't have to worry about the battery life.

The RGB LED screen on the R2 is amazing, best looking monitor or flat screen that I have ever seen, blu rays look amazing, the colors are so vibrant. Makes web browsing better.

Also, understated on these, are the keyboards, I think they are excellent and have a great feel, as I do a lot of typing for my gig, and love working on this.

 

I agree, the keyboard is to die for. The only thing I like better is my old IBM Model Ms lol. As far as portability goes, it can be a bit heavy in the backpack an all, but when I took it on my trip this Christmas it was great to break out at the airport and play FPS and WoW while waiting for the plane (we were delayed several hours).

I caught several people with iPads, Macbooks, netbooks, etc looking while I was messing around, with many different reactions. A few seemed merely curious, others had a weird smug look on their face as if they knew better about something, and I think a couple were jealous. I do know two people who had Macbooks came up to me wanting to ask what this monster was only to go slack-jawed when they saw my screen and what I was playing. After that came many questions that I gladly answered about my laptop, needless to say both were impressed.

It may not be 'portable' in the conventional sense, but it is definitely easier to cart around than a full gaming desktop and is a very impressive desktop replacement. Every now and then I catch myself almost wishing I had built my own gaming desktop rather than buying this thing, but then I think about the times I do like to game on the go. I recall the last laptop I had (HP G60-120US, a joke really) and shudder to think I would still be playing on the go on that thing.

Oh, and speaking of weight/portability, it will never hold a candle to when I was in college (for the very short amount of time I was) and carted my original Xbox around for LAN parties. I always had it, 2+ controllers, a full cd case of games, a small switch, an extra router, memory cards, my school books, a PSP, and all my notebooks in one single backpack I took -everywhere-. I didn't have a car either, I walked from the dorms (about a mile+) to the university proper, to Wal-Mart, etc. All with this ginormous bag on my shoulders. /off-topic

TL;DR It weighs about 10-13 pounds, depending on setup. Add about 1-5 pounds for a bag, the charger, peripherals, etc. Your shoulders get used to it. The screen is droolicious. The keyboard is actually very nice for a rubber...thingy...w/e you call it.

 

This was exactly my point, it is bigger than most laptops but with the parts that are included in it, it is the best.