Don't buy alienware.

Here is why:

Approximately last may, I purchased a Sentia 223 laptop from alienware, it cost considerably more than a comparable competing laptop, but I figured the extra speed and customizability would be worth it. It ended up being just shy of four grand canadian. Thinking ahead, I bought the 2 year extended warranty, reasoning that every other computer I have had either had problems right away, or just after the one year mark.

About a week ago, my computer started to spontaneously die during normal use, shortly after that it would fail to boot: In a nutshell, the 80 gig hard drive went. After a lengthy step by step (and multiple day) process to convince the tech support that the hard drive was in fact dying, they sent me a new one under warranty -and billed me for it-. Their reasoning is that the billing would not go through if I shipped them back the defective hard drive within five days of receiving the new one. This is my only computer at the moment, and I don't know about you but it takes a lot longer than five days to recover from a hard disk failure, especially when you are at work 10-12 hours a day. Doubly so when you have to order a special part online that will allow you to attempt to recover any data. I contacted their customer service department to request an extension so that I could wait until the part I need to connect the hard drive via the USB port arrives so I can get my data off. Note that I cannot ship the hard drive to them now without taking a hammer to it, as there is confidential data on it. I was informed by their customer service department that all they could do was send an e-mail to their rebate department with my request, but that there was no guarantee that I would not be billed.

After successfully installing the hard drive, the battery immediately died. The first time I had ever taken it out of the laptop after putting it in when the laptop was shipped to me was in order to remove the panel over the hard drive so that I could replace it. At first the system would see the hard drive, but would be unable to boot without the AC in, and the laptop would not charge past 7%. If I were to suddenly unplug the laptop (I did this once, it is how i first noticed the problem when I was moving the laptop to a cat5 cable because I needed to download the wireless driver) the laptop would immediately die.

Another call to technical support, another lengthy procedure wherein I was told to hot swap the battery (charge went from 7% to 1%), and then take the battery out and leave it out for 24 hours before placing it in the PC again and seeing if the battery would reboot, for lack of a better term. A few minutes ago, I get off the phone with tech support: The battery is not covered any longer -even under the extended warranty- and will cost about $80 dollars to replace. This contradicting what the original tech guy I talked to told me: that the battery would be replaced if defective.

As an aside, when I bought this computer, a friend of mine bought one nearly identical to it only with the 1.6 instead of 1.8ghs processor. His laptop was riddled with problems including a defective display and motherboard, and it took him months to get it set up, including I might add opening the laptop and fiddling with the cabling with the instruction of an on the phone tech guy. Is it just me or should the laptop come assembled properly? Oh, and the rebates took much longer than stated to arrive.

On the plus side, I did not have to wait for more than a few minutes to speak to one of their tech support guys. Thus far, that has been the only plus of owning this laptop, and really, ideally I would spend no time on the phone with them at all. I would heartily recommend you purchase a toshiba or HP laptop as I and everyone I know has had positive experiences with them, but given the propensity for Alienware machines to die shortly after their warranties expire and given the crappy coverage of the warranty to begin with (o even when you spend a couple hundred bucks to e)xtend it, I will not be buying an Alienware again, and I suggest you don't buy one to begin with.

Cheers,

-Steve

 

Well,Toshiba's support is no good too,perhaps worse,there was someone saying that the first time he turned his tablet on,there came a message saying "please reinstall windows" ,after talking to the support they said they would replace it for 80$ (Toshiba send no recovery CDs with a wide variety of their products) - The man was simply outraged after explaining that the problem was with the first boot the tech support said,yeah we have the record that your computer has a defective windows that's why we are offering you a discount...
Or someone else who took his notebook to Toshiba support in India,He reported that his extra Ram under the keyboard was stolen and he never managed to get it back , the support insisted that there was no Ram,and they didn't have his ram either...

Cheers.

 

Sorry to hear about your unfortunate run of events.

Personally I'm surprised by how much the company has the consumers go into the laptop themselves, thats not to say that no one has the know-how or anything but anyways, it seems like some of those things are deemed "factory repair".

Usually I tell people to try to avoid Alienware if they can, as well as Toshiba (ever check out the Better business buerau/ripoff report on their customer support?). However, I do give thumbs up for HP. Last I checked the top three computer manfacturers in quality and customer support were Lenovo, Apple and HP.

 

Sorry to hear about that. It's not uncommon for hard drives to die, but you shouldn't have been billed for the drive.
Batteries are usually only covered for the first year, might want to check the warranty about that.

 

that sucks. I would try to return it and dispute it with the cc company knowinig that aw will def. give you a hard time returning it. your reason should be they sold you a defective product and wouldn't give you your money back. I mean after having spent THAT much money, I would expect everything to work PERFECTLY out of the box and would accept nothing short of that perfection.

 

While it's unfortunate, it's not unheard of for a Hard Drive to fail after more than a year...

Hope things work out and you get it fixed.

 

I'm annoyed that this is the 3rd time reading this post on two different forums. You don't have to make it your life mission to regesiter for all forums that have AW sections to make your point.

But since I'm already here I'll just copy past my last two posts.

1) you bought it in Mayof 05... just to be clear.

2) The data on your hard drive is probably not lost. So don't throw it away!!! Instead go here: Dtidata

you can download a trial version of Recover It All ... use it to scan your hard drive if it can detect your data... (which it most likely will) ... you can then purchase the software from the site... the site also has a free emergency hotline you can call that is open 24/7

these guys are **** good at helping out... helped me backup 200+ GB of data...

a second option is download a program called Knoppix . the hd crash is mostly caused be windows and since knoppix runs under linux, you can burn it to a cd and boot from the cd and transfer all your data to another hard drive... only problem is, knoppix runs under fat32 format, which means you can ONLY write to FAT32 drives...which means the partitions can only be 30 GB each... but if the data is worth recovering... if theres a means theres a way


ps- you sure you're not laura?

 

I assume from your reaction your are relatively new to computer/technology ownership.
The very *minor* problems you have had are 'par for the course'. So please get used to them.....
If you USE a machine it will need attention (software or hardware) at *least* once a year.
These are not 5 "9"s systems (You do not *want* to know how much they cost....)

--
mothy

 

Who is laura? As for reading it multiple times, I would have assumed you would have noticed it was a repeat before getting to the end ;-). Anyway, these forums are the ones I went to while deciding which laptop to buy, and thought I would chip in my two cents.

No, I am not new to computer ownership. I have a compsci degree, and this is my seventh computer but my first laptop. I used to do professional hardware stuff for my university and now make cell phone games for a living. The only reason I went through tech support at all was to jump through the hoops to get the parts replaced and to make sure I did not void the warranty somehow. My issue isn't with what happened, it is with the shoddy way it was handled. I have dealt with probably a hundred or so dead/dying hard drives in my life (including work). With all the crap I have had from dealing with computers, this is the first time I have been charged for a part replaced under warranty with the intent that the charge be cancelled when they get the busted part back. This is especially irritating given that it is the hard drive, the only part of the computer where a flat swap out is not possible assuming you want your data back. Just to be clear, it is this that has irked me, not the fact that the drive went; though I do take awesome care of my computers and only rarely does a part fail to last at least a couple years. Also I forgot to mention that when I was buying the thing, one of there sales guys assured me that the case was magnesium in the same manner as an ibook or a ?vaio?.. It is this fact that actually prompted me to get the AW: Note that the case is quite clearly plastic when you actually handle it, it only looks like metal in the ads.

That sucks about toshiba too, I have -zero- experience with toshibas warranties or tech support, but when I was lan admining for my university I had a handful of toshiba laptops that were positively ancient but in good working order, and had never even heard of one of them giving trouble. It could be that, like alienware

 

Same here... two threads and now this one. Im sure there is no agenda here

 

So what? I do the same thing whenever I have bad experiences with companies, and then report them to the better business bureau too. People deserve to know about faulty companies. Just because you back alienware is if you were the owner of it or some crap, doesn't mean you should repremand this guy for his right to complain about bad experiences. It's America. We can do that. ::waves the flag::

Personally, i love alienware's machines and I love their stylish looks. Hell, I still go to their website sometimes and dream. But I hate their prices, even though they've been getting better, and I hate their customer service so I'll never buy from them again.

 

This thread isn't going anywhere, so...