M11X Problems

My M11x arrived today, however I've got a couple of problems. My fan sounds like an electric tooth brush on full speed and vibrates the whole keyboard. Is this usual? Also on the front grill the right hand light is much dimmer than the 1 on the left. Finally I seem to have a couple of dead pixels in the centre of the screen. I could live with the dim light and even the pixels, but the fan noise is unbearable. Anyone else have these problems? or am I being overly fussy.

 

Sounds like a shoddy build. I'd call and see if you could do an exchange if they'd let you, but don't let them try to give you a refurbished system in exchange. (Dell is known for this )

 

Sounds like maybe your keyboard isn't secured? Mine never did that.

 

Give Dell a call.

 

You are not being fussy if you are not satisfied. You should contact support and let them know what is happening. You are certainly within your 21-day period so you can request another system be built and this one returned. If you do this, ask the rep about holding on to your system until the new one arrives. This should not be an issue, but let them know.

They will probably want to send out a tech, however if you rather just return it, you need to explain why.

The fan is probably coming into contact with the fan housing and the LED issue has been seen before. Give them a call. They will not send a refurb unit as a replacement since you just received it.

 

Thanks for your assistance guys, I'll call Dell 1st thing. I think as I'm in the uk there is only a 7 day return time rather than 21, but shouldnt be an issue as it only arrived today. Its just a shame really as the machine is actually better than I hoped for apart from those issues.

 

I got that fan noise but since it was the only thing wrong with the laptop then they just changed the fan/heatsink... However since yours seems like it has more problems then yeah, ask for a replacement...

Cheers

 

That fan noise has been reported before. Overall, the fan seems to be a weak part of this system. It has documented wrong behavior, and can be very loud according to some reviews and people here. While some others say it is quiet. I just get a feeling the fan and it assembly isn't of high quality.

 

Fan vibration isn't the complaint that people have with the fan.

Definitely call Dell. Get a whole new system.

My right-hand grill is slightly dimmer then the left, just a touch though. I use AlienFX Lite though, and I just adjusted the left one's brightness a touch

 

Currently getting the run around by Dell customer support, they were extremely rude and unhelpful (almost accused me of lying) and said they couldnt find any record of my call to technical support and I would have to call tech support to get a case ref (very sorry to say some profanity passed my lips). Currently stuck waiting on the phone with tech support, who are speaking with customer service. Very tempted to cancel the whole order and tell them to stick it.

 

Tech support finally got through to customer services , who advised them that they could only process a refund not a replacement. Not sure what's up with that. Anyway tech support are looking into the replacement and are going to call me back. I have to say the guys at tech support which I think is in Holland have been very helpful, can't say the same for Dell India though. I think unless dell get this sorted very soon they are going to loose a lot of customers. I have spent several thousand pounds on alienware systems over the years when they were based in Ireland and would have recommended them to anyone even after the Dell takeover, now though this is probably going to be my last Alienware purchase.

 

Just ask to speak to a supervisor. Then ask to speak to his supervisor and work your way up the ladder. People don't like when you go above their head. Then they may work harder to please you.

 

Huh. Mine had a strange rattling sound I could not figure out. I took off the back cover and found someone had dropped a loose screw into the case

While I was in there I also found the Gobi card's black wire was not connected.

It's all fine now, but the assembly was done very sloppily.

 

You know of course that most customer service organizations have found a way around this? They call everyone a manage or director, and when you start asking for superiors they just pass the call around the horn.

 

Okay, I'm one of those who has the fan problems. Received mine on 13/03/2010, and I reckon there has been a really bad batch of M11X's made. I've had multiple problems as well from the very first day:

1. Fan sounding like a lawnmower/shaver and VERY LOUD. I also can stop the fan from spinning (proven by no sound & no air coming out from the back) by simply pressing lightly on the top left of the keyboard. Refer this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwQ6xLAd8qM

2. Some cooling fins at the back are crushed together.

3. "Wireless Connections" LED at top left of keyboard is partially unlit - bad/spoilt LED behind the plastic piece.

4. Light on the front right side is dimmer than the one on the left.

I've had an engineer from Dell come over. Issues #1 and #2 were fixed by replacing the Fan/Heat sink assembly, which is one piece by itself. The initial one looked as if someone was in a bad mood or simply incompetent, he/she screwed it on too tightly, and as the engineer was removing the original piece, HALF of a screw came out. We were not able to locate the other half of the screw

Issue #3. was fixed by replacing the top piece. No complaints here.

However, for issue #4, the problem actually got worse: the light on the front right side is actually much clearly dimmer than the original! I asked him to help me get another bottom piece issued by Dell but he said I have to call them myself. Guess what. When I called Dell, they said the engineer is the one who has to call them as he has actually seen the problem. More passing the buck. Grrr...

To add to my grief, I only realized he didnt reassemble my laptop properly after he left, as now I cannot close it fully; there's a 2mm gap between the cover and the keyboard when I close it. Yep, he didnt screw in the keyboard properly, upon closer inspection the keyboard is bulging up slightly in the middle. Partially my fault, but in my defence, I wasn't expecting something like this to happen, and was mainly focussing on the fan issue. Plus, according to him, it's his second M11X he's worked on. Bleargh.

And for the grand finale... I just tried hooking up the M11X to my Dell ST2410 monitor via HDMI... And. It. Does. Not. Work. Tested the very same monitor and HDMI cable with a friend's laptop and it works fine. The VGA port is servicable though, using that as an interim measure. I feel like e-mailing Dell's country manager or someone who can make a difference. Anyone has any ideas how I can get my issues sorted out once and for all? I really feel like returning this

 

HDMI only works with the NVidia graphics card - make sure you're in the performance mode...

Sorry to hear about the gap - I'd call Dell back and either have them send out another tech to address the issue, or have them replace the unit.

 

In addition to the above, HDMI probably takes some tweaking before it will work cleanly. I had to update the driver for the external monitor (really a Samsung HDTV) and then set it as the default sound device before it would work for me. At some point, the Realtek driver got messed up and needed to be reinstalled. It doesn't output via the Realtek driver though, it uses some generic driver when I have the HDMI cable plugged in.

Now my only compliant is that it is only outputting stereo to via the HDMI. This isn't a showstopper though, just a mild annoyance. The 720p picture is outstanding before even attempting to get 1080p to work.

 

Ah, just tried that and was gonna ask if it's NVIDIA only. Thanks for the quick responses, jsgiv and Blaaargh! I thought he somehow managed to mess up/the ports are connected to the "new" bottom piece and that piece had a broken HDMI port. Well, one less thing to seeth about.

Engineer is coming again in 12 hours time, but we were both unable to get a new bottom piece from Dell till he comes and assesses it again. So all I'm gonna (hopefully) get done is reassemble the bulging keyboard properly. And will have to get him to come ANOTHER time for a new bottom piece. This is giving me more trouble than my old Acer desktop ages ago! Lucky this forum exists and we can compare notes though!

 

Well very sad to say the person in tech support who promised he would get back to me regarding a replacement before the end of the day hasn't. I phoned at 8pm to find out what was happening and he had gone home. VERY dissapointed with dell at this point. Its obvious to me that there is no quality control testing before these things leave the factory and Dell clearly couldn't give a stuff about their customers. I know the £800 I spent on this laptop isnt a great deal for Dell and this clearly shows in their attitude. If there was an alternative to this product on the market this would be going back for a refund.

 

Interesting - I have a Samsung HDTV as well - HDMI works flawlessly with mine..

 

Just spent about 2 hours on the phone with Dell this morning, getting transfered between Tech support and Customer services. Tech support say they can only do a replacement after they have attempted a repair and customer services say they can only do a refund not a replacement. I dont think I'm being unreasonable to expect a replacement when a new item turns up faulty. I'm currently waiting for a "senior manager" to call me back but to be honest I'm not holding out much hope. I would probably accept a repair if they offered me some sort of compensation, however if this is not forthcoming I will just get a refund. Its very dissapointing as I've bought Alienware in the past and found them very good to deal with, it seems like Dell have gone out of their way to ruin their reputation.

 

Well I noticed this morning my M11x also has the screen gap issue. I'm done with this thing. I wanted to like it but to many little issues. I'm going to stick with my XPS M1210. From day one that computer has been great. I'm just going to upgrde to a 500GB 7200RPM drive and put windows 7 on it. I will wait until the M11x R2, M12x or M13x comes out.

 

Hey guys,

This machine is starting to annoy me. I purchased an Intel 80GB SSD today and installed Windows 7 on it. Now, for some reason the fan has decided to kick in on max no matter what happens. I've followed the optimization thread very precisely. Even avoided installing Alienware CC just to keep the ressources down. The fan keeps running and rebooting doesn't help anything.

Has anyone experienced this with an SSD drive? Before with the normal HDD, I could reboot and the fan would stop spinning.

 

This is a known issue and I believe AW (via our Resident AW Alien) is looking into this. The discussion can be found here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=462447

Once they have pinned it down, a BIOS update should resolve it.

 

Alienware is never going to release an m12x or m13x. Theres no point.

 

Hey Guys, i just registered cause I alike vorbis, have similar issues. Firstly im from Sydney Australia and i got my notebook from JBhifi, I've had it replaced already, but still faults. Here are mine.

1. the initial M11x, it was scratched on the left side right out of the box, i couldn't justify spending 1.5k on it to get a scratched laptop. The screen was also creeky when you close the lid.

2. the 2nd M11x, Light on the front right side is dimmer than the one on the left. YES this SUCKS , i hate it, annoys the crap out of me to no end. I'm hopeing that JBHiFi will issue me with another replacement, because this is just faulty! i tried to see if i could fix it, perhaps it was just the lights being installed badly, but when i tried to open the base to have a look and see, it sits behind a huge metal plate, which i believe will require the entire casing to be removed to get access to.

Not riskin my warranty, hopefully i'll just get a replacement one.

I share your pain!!

 

Along time a go in a call centre far far away......................

Well still waiting for a call from Dell about a replacement (I first called on Tuesday and its now Friday). I have had some contact from a Dell rep monitoring these forums, which does give me hope that there is at least someone left at Dell interested in customer relations, but for the life of me I cant understand why customer services couldnt have sorted the problem in the first instance. If I dont get a response by the end of today, I'm going to have to request a refund and then rejoin the delivery queue. I think Dell needs to take a serious look at customer service as I don't think they realise the knock on effect of 1 bad experience. Prior to this I had frequently reccomended Dell systems to friends, family and work colleaugues and they in turn to their friends and family, which when you follow down the chain could easily add up to tens of thousands of pounds worth of orders. 1 persons bad experience, which leads to lost recomendations could end up costing Dell far more than the cost of the original order. If there was an alternative to the M11x in the market, I would have given up already cancelled the order and gone elsewhere.

 

Well, I finally received a phone call from Tech support to tell me the only way to get a replacement system is to request a refund from customer services return the laptop and then order another 1. Quite frankly the way I have been treated by Dell is absolutely disgraceful. I will not be reordering the M11x and will not be shopping at Dell anytime in the future, furthermore I will be telling everyone I know to avoid Dell like the plague. This experience has left me extremely bitter and dissapointed.

 

You never know. As of right now I will just wait until they iorn out all the issues out with this M11x. I like the system its fast and I also like the keyboard but it has just to many little issues that all add up in the end. We will see how the R2 version is.

 

Well, the technician came, for the THIRD TIME in the SIX DAYS which I received my M11X. This time, the palm rest lights are both working, no complaints there.

The keyboard however, I found, was actually messed up by the previous technician, it's bent at one end, which led to some keys being non uniform after installation. This time, I had to watch the new technician like a hawk when he installed the new keyboard.

First time around, he neglected to fit in a hinge thingy on the left, which led to the keys on the left being raised above the casing when looking from the side, as compared to the right side which was completely flush. I had to troubleshoot this for him and he managed to get it flush the second time. Too flush I'm afraid. Now the ESC and "P" keys are lower than the rest of the keys. I didn't dare to tell him to try again in case he messes it up worse than before.

What kind of brand new machine has these kind of issues??? I feel I have a badly refurbished second hand machine now!

I'm going to try to ask for a replacement one more time tomorrow, failing which I will definitely get a refund for this machine, AND also my ST2410 monitor which I bought at the same time which has a clump of dead pixels. And Dell can kiss goodbye to any further business from me and any acquaintance of mine who has a chance to hear my story.

 

not true. I manage to get a replacement without requesting for a refund. I can keep my current m11x until the replacement arrive, then ship it back to dell the old unit.

 

I think he knows it is not true, which makes him all the more upset with the CS people misleading him.

 

Quite right. I know that other people have managed to get replacements, which is what makes it so frustrating. I have one slim hope and that is 1 of the Dell reps monitoring the forums is trying to help, but he was unable to get the replacement authorisation to me this afternoon and my deadline for a refund is Monday.

 

I got mine today - really weird, had a few crashes when OC'd but then was stable for a few hrs, after that I got full BSOD's. I've requested a replacement - has anyone else had this problem, got a replacement and then had no further problems?

 

Have they been able to order you a replacement? I'd be interested to as I've been told I can only return and reorder.

Thanks

 

Me too, I've been told by Tech Support I have to call Customer Dis(service) and the latter says I have to get a refund.

 

Hi guys, I'm having to return mine as well sadly. I haven't made the call yet. I'm in the UK. Anyone who has managed to get a replacement, how did you go about it? Call tech support first and tell them your issue(s) or call customer service first?

 

Success at last. I sent an e-mail to [email protected] on Friday outlining my issues. I got a call 1st thing this morning to apologise and to arrange a replacement.