M11x R1 dead on deployment

Greetings, all.

I purchased an M11x R1 back in February and have been using it off and on as a gaming system and household entertainment platform with a 40" LCD TV serving as an external monitor. It has run beautifully until about three days ago.

In the middle of normal operations--running "Mount & Blade: Warband" after about twenty minutes of typing in WordPad--I experienced the "sudden death" problem. The computer was on AC power, loading the game's main menu, when it instantly shut down and went completely black. I cannot start the machine using the power button and have tried removing the battery pack, holding the power for 30+ sec, and then reattaching the battery and trying to boot. No joy with or without AC power plugged in or with or without the battery.

My next recourse is to simply send it back to Dell and wait for repairs, but the complicating factor for me is that this fatal crash happened on day one of a year long deployment to Afghanistan. So, the portable little gaming machine I'd carefully groomed for the purposes of keeping me sane has given up the ghost right when it should have begun to flourish.

Before I pack it up and send it back home to be repaired and returned (probably a couple months given the logistics involved), I thought I would ask here and see if anyone else knows a possible solution to this problem? Again, dropping the battery out and trying to reset it that way has not worked. Any solutions or advice you may have are much appreciated.

-Ken

 

sad to hear man, i guess something fried. yeah i think sending it back to dell would be your best bet. waiting to get it back is going to be a lol. im stationed on okinawa and waiting for my r2 was driving me crazy. stay stafe in Afghanistan

 

Yea man I know how that feels. Sorry to hear it.

BTW, ill be in Oki next month lol.

 

Your best bet is to find an authorized dell repair partner in your area, usually this is much faster than dell and if you explain your situation I'm sure they will sort it in one day.

 

You did see that he and the laptop are now in Afghanistan, right?

 

@ varnado he's in afghanistan lol, military mail takes 10 - 12 days with Priority, and pretty sure there isn't an authorized dell place there xD
@MLM0351
i take it that you're an assualtman? lol you're gonna love it here in oki, i do. the only bad part is that its really hot and humid over here right now. black flag almost every day >_>

 

Wow! Genius

 

sry I just wanted to help

 

Sorry to hear about your misfortune. Assuming you purchased the unit in the States and that you are in the military, support can get you parts. The problem is that we don't have service capability over there. If you are technical, you could try replacing the motherboard yourself. It is relatively difficult, but if you take pictures and keep track of where every screw goes (an egg crate works well), it isn't too bad. I think we have teardown instructions somewhere on support.dell.com (although I'd have to verify). If you need some help with it, send me a PM and we'll see what we can do.

 

Here is the teardown link you are referring to, straight from dell:

YouTube - Alienware M11x Teardown **READ SAFETY PRECAUTIONS PRIOR TO REPLACING PARTS** (Official Video)

 

You know, I ready this post last night and as I was playing ARMA 2 I remembered that I read another post about a month or so ago about a similar situation. Someone on the forums playing while connected to a large LCD and the m11x fried. I wonder if the 335mGT has an issue with gameplay under higher resolutions? Anyone remember this?

Bw, StevenX

 

Thanks for the responses. I'm not unwilling to try and swap out something as substantial as the motherboard on my own, but this isn't an environment in which I really want to be experimenting with my tech skills. Sounds like I'll just have to suck it up and ship it back home.

Before I came out here I spent several weeks selecting and downloading a number (30+) of games and other applications. As a result, I consider the HDD in this thing to be made of solid gold. Is there a specific way I can communicate to tech support that I need that hard drive back exactly the way it is? I'm imagining a further nightmare of getting the system back from repair after so many weeks to find the drive replaced or reformatted.

Perhaps, but if so I doubt that was responsible in this case. When I was using the LCD as a monitor, I never went beyond the native 1366x768 resolution even when playing games. And when it died it was using only the notebook's original monitor.