Alienware M17-R1 Full Restoration

Well you should think it twice because you will not get much money out of it. I saw a full system selling on ebay in $700 (includes all the Alienware discs, even Alienrespawn and some more stuff) and the last time I search for it it was in $600 so it looks like people don't want to buy it.

 

I have to agree with Rotary Heart, simply because I have also contemplated selling my M17. It is still more powerful than most mainstream laptops, although it obviously isn't going to put up any killer numbers by today's standards.

If you do decide to sell it, I would part it out. The QX9300 alone goes for between $160 and $200. GPUs could sell for $100 a piece. It isn't worth selling as a complete unit.

I am currently looking to upgrade mine with the QX9300. 4850s are out of the question...they're too rare and therefore folks want an arm and a leg for them.

 

funny I just saw a system with much lower specs than mine sell for $800
Black HD 17 5 inch Alienware M17x R1 Gaming Laptop | eBay
granted that he lied and said it was an M17X-R1, But Look At Those Specs, Dual core CPU, 3GB of ram, Single GPU setup. laughable highway robbery. just My restoration alone was about $500-$600 when you add the new screen and USB audio board, I don't work for free, My M17 may be an old rig but its definitely up to date save the GPU's I think I can get at least $1000, bare minimum $800, and walk away with a few hundred bucks for all my trouble.

 

Well good luck then.

 

I don't see the enthusiasm there guys lol, she may be old but plastic surgery works wonders!

Screen: 17" WideUXGA 1920 x 1200 LCD
Processor: Core 2 Quad Q9000 2.00GHz
Ram: 8GB Crucial DDR3 1066MHz
Drive 1: 64GB Crucial M4 SSD
Drive 2: Samsung M8 1TB 5400rpm
Graphics Cards: Radeon HD 3870 x2 (crossfire)

I think $999 buy it now is a good start Here are some reference listings, keep in mind these are lower spec, and not nearly in as nice shape. these are all selling for $700+, scuffed up, no GPU specified, single hard drive, nothing comes close.

Alienware M17 R1 17" Notebook Quad CPU Q9000 2 53GHz X2 256GB X2 | eBay


Alienware M17 R1 Complete Gamer's System Laptop | eBay

Alienware M17 R1 Completer Gamer's System Laptop | eBay


the barebones laptop with nothing is around $300, when you add the $600 in upgrades + the price of GPU's even build from scratch my rig would have costed well over $1000

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Genuine-Ali...79755919?pt=Laptops_Nov05&hash=item51a6246c8f

 

But you are forgetting that they could be in that price, but that doesn't mean they are going to sell them. Maybe they have been in eBay months. Also did you read the description? One of them is offering 2 laptops for that price. You could have an i7 but that's still 2 laptops against one.

I don't want to tell you that you will not sell it, but just be sure of what you will get of it and don't spect high money because you will probably get disappointed.

 

we shall see, I just saw one lower specked than mine, with a dual core and 3gb of ram go for $800! it literally sold, I probably won't be listing mine for another few days, going to make a video, tweak the system a bit, do some benchmarks, etc. what do you think are the best drivers for the 3870x2? the ones I'm using had some bad performance, I was able to play some CS:GO but it stutters a bit, maybe its due to a bad Xfire Profile?

 

Well I haven't had any good performance in Windows 7 + My best performance is Windows Vista Ultimate (The one it came with) and with the ATI driver 7.01.01.809. I have the Alienware Disc installer which have the .exe to install that driver. So if you want it let me know.

Other than that driver NONE worked for me. I have 80+ fps with Vista Ultimate and that driver in 3D Mark 06 fist GPU stress. With Windows 7 + I got 40+fps... We can do some benchmarks and stuff if you want. Just ask me and I will

 

Sure Man, I would Appreciate It If You Could Upload The GPU Driver, as far as the Disc's Go I don't have them, But I Do Have The OS on a USB stick + the Vista Key Is Below The Battery. I honestly haven't used a cd/dvd to install an operating system in years..... my main desktop rig doesn't even have a disc drive lol

 

Currently uploading. I will edit this post when its finished.

Done! Here: https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=EADC3A9A1614D45!362&authkey=!AAsdrcq6-VN115g Let me know if you need anything else.

 

Thanks man Appreciate it, was wondering if you have any benchmarks screenshots to prove your claims about vista vs 7 on this laptop? Needs a re-format either way before it goes up for sale. just don't wanna cause myself extra hours of work without knowing for sure.

 

Hello guys,

I'm going to have a crack a restoring an old Area 51 M17 R1 to its former glory with a bit more hmph this time.
Got a QX9300, GTX280M MXM III v2,1 graphics card and basically the full chassis with all the parts intact.
Have a read a few times that a couple of people have managed to SLI two GTX280's without an SLI cable, you reckon its worth a try?

 

I don't have screenshots, sorry as soon as I saw the fps I just exit the benchmark and re installed windows vista. Let me see if I can find my spare HDD so I can install Windows 7 on it and take some screen shots.

Will let you know.

Well I found something that I think it can help you:

Windows 7: http://www.3dmark.com/3dmv/4648627
Windows Vista: http://www.3dmark.com/3dmv/4729450

 

WOW, looks like a MAJOR LEAP, the score is nearly double in Vista..... I guess that goes to show that CFX doesn't work properly in win 7. +rep to you rotary. bench scores and game performance is really the selling point with this old rig imo...

 

I thought the same thing. I had the exact same scores with Windows 8 so there has to be something wrong with windows 7+ ATI drivers. If you need anything else feel free to ask. I saw a huge difference when playing Skyrim, Oblivion and Resident Evil 5 all of those lag a lot with Windows 7 and now I;m lag free!! I could even set the details a bit higher Now I really feel that I have a Alienware

 

+rep to you rotary
If it is not asking too much trouble I need a copy of the recovery disc ISO files, I'd be willing to even paypal you $5 or $10 for your time and effort. I'm sure this is something the next owner will be needing, seeing as flash drives can be easily erased I'd like to send some discs with it, unfortunately with my job I move frequently about once a year, so the discs have been lost in the madness of packing and unpacking.

 

Yea sure, which one you mean? The M17 VISTA X64 SUPPORT CD? This one have all the drivers and software that the M17 came with, even the ATI driver that I gave you.

Or just the recovery iso?

 

I'll Probably be needing Both ISO's, The Vista x64 OS Disc, And The Driver Disc, I have contacted Alienware and they don't support 'pre-dell' systems. so there is no way to have new disc's sent to me. was planning on just using vista on USB stick and downloading the drivers, but if the new owner runs into issues I doubt they will be able to do all that to get it working right.

 

I will PM you when its done uploading (its huge).

 

right on, PM sent, Later On I will try and get a mirror up so others can download them as well.

 

Well I'm almost done uploading the drivers to media fire so I will create a new thread which will include download links for all the drivers (the stock ones) for Vista x64.

Well the thread is here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ystems/723970-m17-r1-stock-vista-drivers.html

 

I'd Like To Thank Rotary For Providing The Original Vista ISO Files For The M17-R1, I Will Be Making A Download Mirror Soon With My Storage On Dropbox, Just Burnt The ISO's Now, About To Make The Switch To Back To Vista!

 

Well let me know if everything goes fine and you are welcome.

 

vista installed without any issues, most of the drivers worked fine, the wifi driver needed to be updated, also the stock video driver doesn't work particularly well. what would you recommend, I was going to try the legacy drivers friom AMD's website, I wonder what driver that guy was using with the 7K vantage score?

 

What you mean is not working well? I tried those, but I didn't get good results, let me know if they work for you.

 

alright so I updated to service pack 2, now using the 13.1 legacy drivers, crossfire seems to be working fine, the only game I've tested so far is CS:GO, I figured the source engine has been around forever, the stock drivers were terrible very choppy, 13.1 very smooth no lag at all, I've yet to test any other games but I do want to run a bench in vantage later today, hopefully vista beats my gimped win 7 score of 3500, in the end it really comes down to driver support, shame I know these GPU's are capable of running pretty much any DX9 game on the market.

 

OK, I've done a bench Half Life 2 Lost Coast, 86.57 FPS, 1920x1200 High Settings (No AA or MSAA) But Crossfire is indeed working in vista with Legacy 13.1 Catalyst. I cannot take a screen because for some reason print screen button isn't working in vista.

OK I have set the Crossfire Option in The CCC to Optimised 1x1
Legacy 13.1 http://www.3dmark.com/3dmv/4745526
Legacy 13.4 Beta http://www.3dmark.com/3dmv/4745702

 

still not getting good performance, I've Tried Stock which was so bad I didn't even want to benchmark it, tried 13.1 and 13.4 beta, next going to try these modded drivers:
AMD Catalyst 12.10 WHQL_Modded for LEGACY GPUs - SUPER STABLE SUPER PERFORMANCE - Guru3D.com Forums
Will Edit Post With Results

 

Did you check if you have a bad card or cable? Thats amazingly low! Will be waiting on those last results.

 

the cable is fine, also says crossfire is enabled in the Catalyst Control Panel, Shows Main Card And Linked Card....
not sure I just made a video of the laptop, its going up on ebay tomorrow, tired of tinkering with it honestly, its back to stock settings, still runs games perfect, synthetic benchmarks aren't real world anyway, not going to base everything off one bench... heres the video http://youtu.be/00mWtvy10Q0
there is some gaming footage in there as well, not a slow laptop by any means.

 

I found something interesting, I made a partition and installed both windows 7 and windows 8. I noticed that in dxdiag Windows 7+ says DirectX Version: DirectX 11 and with Vista it says DirectX 10. Could this be the issue we have?

 

lol its funny that you mention that, I'm Running Windows Vista x64 Service Pack 2, and when I ran DXDIAG my DX version is 11. Service Pack 2 is an 'optional install' you wont see it on the windows update list, you have to download the EXE from the microsoft website, and SP2 is 'no longer supported' but it contains DX11 Support, maybe its just for the ultimate users who knows, I thought they never released DX11 on Vista.

 

Well it looks like that doesn't do anything then... I really want to solve the Windows 7+ issue with mine since I want to run Windows 8 again.

 

WAIT!!!! I thought the M17-R1 only supported card was the HD3870??? ...because of it being a different caliber from the newer ones or something like that.

If I'm wrong, that's excellent news! I did big cosmetic change recently of my machine through z-tronics service:
_Repaired the broken hinges, changed the skullcap panel A, panel B, and C. I couldn't find panel D (the bottom part).
_I upgraded my RAM from 3GB(1+2) to 6GB(4+2)
_Had my HD3870 mastercard replaced after it started failing big time. I bought the master card from an ebay source for a surprisingly good price in my opinion.
_Change my left fan which which became extremely noisy after I tried to clean it up (I believe I had accidentally pushed some dust in instead XD )

Issues left:
_Right speaker partially muted after grape juice spilled on that side XD ,
_and possibly graphic card upgrade... you tell me!!!
_Also I am having a BIG issue with my Windows 8 install. It never shutsdown/restarts properly because of a BSOD during the process... I have been trying to fix that issue with driver updates and combinations for like 3 days already since I got back my system -_- Anyone has some insight on that?

 

I did get those issue if I did a clean install of Windows 8. I just fixed every issue I had with it by doing a upgrade from my Alienrespawn disc (vista) to windows 7 and then to windows 8 so far everything is working great.

 

Hey did you sell it? What AMD driver are you using?

 

Hey there. New guy here :hi2:. I'm going to be building an M17 from the ground up using Ebay. I know for price/vs performance it doesn't make much cents, but a BYO laptop project is just too much fun to pass up, especially if you are going to end up with a REAL alienware (pre-Dell). Glad to find other people with the same kind of bug. Anywhoo...I've been working up to this project for a while, and have a good set of drivers downloaded from the official Alienware site in the UK, as well as a few bios versions (10, 13,14), an alienware Vista 64 .iso that should work, and the whitebook user's guide. Not sure who has what, so if anyone needs any of these, please let me know.

BTW, I am curious about people's experiences with BSOD when attempting to load up new OS's. I bought an M17 off Ebay a while ago, and ran into a ton of trouble with these when trying to install a RAID with WIN 7, and the WIN8 pre-release. I couldn't even make it throught the install and update process. Still had the same problems with the x64 .iso that I listed, but it seemed to be a little more stable. At the time I assumed the system was bad, but now I am curious if this is a common problem. Comments?

 

Well I have installed Vista ultimate, 7 ultimate, 8 pro and Ubuntu (10-13) and the only one giving me BSOD was win 7. Right now Win 8 after a upgrading from Vista is working as never! Super fast and without any issue.

 

Great thread! I just want to replace my keyboard, and I ordered and received the UK keyboard listed in the initial post. I am ready to install it, but was wondering if anyone knows of any videos for doing just the keyboard? The Youtube video posted earlier goes a whole lot beyond what I just want to do, and I'm afraid of overkilling something that could be relatively simple!

 

The restoration M17 R1 story is so fabulous. It saved my M17 R1 and got the parts from the links you shared.
There is still one issue. Where can I find a new battery. It is the W83066LC model. I tried searches on battery providers. It is either out of stock or the providers are from e-vendors where several forums warn the low quality or lack of supply. Would love to continue using my M17.

 

Great restoration you had there bro...

Hey bro, can you show me all your mininum and maximum temperatures? for both GPU and CPU or others? Usually I use HWmonitor from cpuid.com.

And btw, did you get a new power adapter also? If yes, which one did you get? The one for m17x r4 or the older ones?

Also, one last thing. Did you replace the Thermal Pad on North Bridge with Thermal Paste? or did you get another thermal pad for it? I'm not sure what's the best solution for it cuz my thermal pad has been broken.

I need to do some restoration on mine as well. Thanks a lot. Cheers

 

I was looking over the two benchmarks, and I made an account just so I could point this out. In the Windows 7 results your processor is the Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7500, but in the Vista results your processor is the Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q9300. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this account for the increased performance?

 

Wow I can't believe that I posted the wrong link, I will search around and try to find the correct link. Sorry about that, but the CPU only boosted the CPU score, check how bad was the GPU score. I developed a program that solves this issue for me, right now I'm running Windows 8 and the program I made and I'm getting pretty nice scores.

 

Hey again. Hope this post is still alive. I wrote a while back that I was building an m17 r1 barebone with parts from Ebay. Got the last of the parts in the mail today, and spend all day trying to get it to work with no success. Hoping the community can help get my project back on track!

My problem is that the laptop screen is not coming on. When I power it on, all the status lights for hdd, trackpad, power, etc come on, cd drive spins, fans test cycle, but the screen doesn't so much as blink. Further more, I tried hitting the cmos reset in hopes of fixing the problem, but now the laptop keeps powering itself back on whenever I turn it off using long press on power button/unplug. Not sure why cmos reset would cause this, but more on that later. Concerning the unresponsive screen, I am not sure if it is:

1)The wrong video card? I only have one at the moment, a 3870m slave. Is the laptop able to function using only a slave card? Additionally, which slot should I be putting the card in?

2)The wrong ram? I picked up 8gb (2x4) for it, and was going to update the bios once I got it up and running. The ram itself is also 1333mhz. Would the ram somehow be keeping the computer from fully powering on if it is the wrong size/clock speed?

3)The wrong cpu? I am currently trying to run an Intel T8300, which is a 2.4 with 800mhz fsb. Would running a chip with a slower fsb rating that the board cause the computer to fail to fully power on?

Anyway, up at 5:30a after spending all day trying to get it to work and looking for answers. If anyone has insight, PLEASE HELP!!

 

If you cleared the CMOS battery then it will turn on, right after putting the battery, to the bios so you can set it up again.

I'm not quite sure that it will run without the master GPU (mine didn't when I was trying my GPUs). Although I'm not sure if you can install the slave in the place of the master (never tried it).

RAM and CPU are both ok.

Does your HDD/SDD have any OS installed?

 

Thanks for quick reply.

So, to recap. If I clear the Cmos, it will start itself up again automatically to allow me to set up the Bios? The problem is, though, that this is a persistent behavior. Now, whenever I try turning it off with long hold, or I unplug it to work on it, it will start itself up again after about 10 seconds. Did it maybe 20 times last night, and I only reset the Cmos a couple times. Do you think that this is still related to the Cmos reset? If so, that would make sense.

As for the GPU, I have tried the slave in both positions, with the same result. I believe that the computer is detecting the GPU because when it is in, the GPU fan cycles on briefly during startup, but with the GPU pulled, the fan locks into its highest setting and remains at full power until the computer is off. I am assuming that this means that when the card is out, the computer is not detecting the card's heat sensor and is defaulting the fan to the highest setting. When you tried your M17 with just the one card in, did you notice if the screen flicked at all, like it was getting some sort of power? My screen is completely unresponsive in all scenarios.

Had HDD installed, but no OS on it.

Thanks so much for responding so quickly. Still not giving up on having my Alienware laptop!

 

Yes it will boot by itself when you clear the CMOS. I have never turned it off while setting it, so I don't know.

It was at a black screen with no activity at all. Are you planing on getting the master?

You could try to add a tv or monitor with HDMI, mine shows the bios in the external monitor, that way you could tell if its showing something. Although I'm not sure if it should show something.

 

I'm ordering the master and should have it within a week. I tried hooking up an external monitor, but had no luck with it. No post or any other output. This seems to point toward a video problem, and not one specifically with the master since it should be showing post on an external. I am hoping that the master card will be the solution to the problem, and I'll keep you updated. BTW, will that FPS mod you wrote work for these cards? I would like to run Win7 if I can.

Thanks again for all the help and info!

 

Yes it will, those are the cards I'm using. I'll be waiting for the update.

 

Hi there, I am going to be honest I am following this thread like a bible for the restoration of my newly acquired pre-owned. However I have had issues with the removal of the keyboard and the heat sink. Is there a screw roughly under the enter key? I have tried to pull it off to the extend that it sliced my finger tips but it still refused to budge. I believe I removed all the screws but I can't say. Also with the head sink, the putty or glue that holds it on top of the units, how hard should I pull to get that off? Should I lever it off or just pull? What is your recommendation?