Refurbished alienware laptops in the uk

Anyone here had any dealings with Refurbished Dell Laptops - Cheap Dell Laptops - New Dell Laptops @ UK Laptops Ltd?
Because im looking into buying a M15X from there.

 

I'm getting mine tomorrow from them, will let you know how it goes mate.

 

I seen a reference to this site before similar to your question but I never really hear anything else.

That must be a good thing IMHO.

Good luck to you both with you purchases.

 

Just be careful because some of them have foreign keyboards.

 

Oh I see you have spotted this already.....as mentioned in another thread.

Whats the difference with an Italian keyboard from a UK one?

 

@OCP15K Thanks mate,I hope you fill me in with good news and everthing goes smooth.

Also found another refurb site http://ndc.co.uk/ be nice to hear if anyone has dealt with them too.

 

Stickers on the different keys(most of the keys). Received a refurbished M17x last week, developed a minor fan fault on one of the gtx280's, so retuned it. Other than the fault and the stickers, the lappie was in perfect condition.

 

Thats who I dealt with(NDC.co.uk), Good service...so far(awaiting refund!!!!!!).Just unfortunate the lappie developed a minor fault. . Anyway when the refund comes through I'll give them the thumbs up.

 

Do they just peel off then?

 

No, they seemed to have quite a good adhesive on them and fitted quite well. Suspect they wouldn't last forever though, and didn't let all of the back-lighting through.

 

I got mine from NDC.
It has a German keyboard (with the Y and Z swapped)
I just swapped the actual keys round so they are right now.
Mine also had stickers on every key but i removed them all easily except the
": ;'[]#,./ " keys as these are in a different location in English.

But so far "3 months" everything has worked perfectly and they delivered really fast,
The only gripe i've got is you cant change anything underneath like the RAM or HDD without breaking their warranty due to a sticker seal on the cover.
I broke my warranty within a week when i installed my SSD lol.

I just hope it doesnt develop a fault.

 

There are a couple of M17x UK keyboards on ebay at the moment if you are really bothered.

 

Well, I recieved my M15x and it was like brand new. Some annoying problems on the software side though.
There isn't a recovery CD or even a recovery partion
There isn't alienware FX/Command center installed
Its basically Windows 7 installed without anything Alienware on it.
There is no Windows 7 CD key (some sticker was blatantly removed under the laptop).
Came with a standard power adaptor.

Basically, sometimes I think maybe I should of bought a brand new one so I get all the original stuff and extras, but I don't have the money to spend so I'm not that bothered.

Other than all above, its all running good!

 

Nice to hear its running good and looks as new,I think you can get most of the software you need from the dell website.
Think i will just hold of for now and get a new one because the prices dont differ that much,may i ask what the specs are and how much you paid?

 

Q720 1.6Ghz 4.0GB RAM 500GB HDD 260 GTX and I paid £999.99 for it. Can you get recovery disks from Dell? I'm gonna have a check.

 

Personally i would never buy a Dell rufurb again, i had an experience with an M1730 that i`m happy to forget.

I bought my M1730 from a reputable Dell re-seller with a 4 year NBD warranty, after a fairly short time the M1730 started to develop a problem. After numerous calls to Dell they arranged for an engineer to come out, the first engineer turned up and replaced the faulty part but after a few days the problem returned.

After that i had 3 engineers fail to show up on the date that they were supposed to, i then had an engineer finally turn up and he couldn`t solve the problem.

Anyway to cut a long story short i asked dell for a refund, this is where the main problem started. Dell were only prepared to refund me the amount that the re-seller paid to them which was around £1300, i paid the reseller £1750 so that was a £450 short fall.

The system developed a fault after 3 months which was outside of the re-sellers full refund period so i was left at the mercy of Dell, they dug their heels in and said that they were not going to refund me anything more than the re-seller paid to them.

I said ok fair enough then i`ll take a replacement M1730 with the exact same spec, mine had the X9000 Extreme processer and bluray RW, it was the highest spec M1730 that they did. They said that they would search for one and let me know when they had found one.

I got an email about a week later saying that they had sourced me an M1730 with the exact same spec, a day later i rang them to see when they were sending it out. They then turned round to me and said "Were sorry but twe can`t find that system now, you will have to take a refund" which was far less than i paid for it like i explained above.

Anyway, a day later they emailed me to say that they had now found another machine with the exact same spec. I rang them to confirm the spec and when it would be delivered, i got the same response as the previous time which was "Were sorry but twe can`t find that system now, you will have to take a refund".

I contacted the re-seller just to see if their was anything he could do as they have more power than the average customer, after a few days of him trying various things he decided to give me a full refund and said that he would take on the faulty M1730 and sort it out with Dell.

Basically Dell were going to leave me high and dry and were trying to force me to take to take a refund which would have been a £450 loss to me.

In my experience the 4 year NBD warranty wasn`t worth the paper it was written on, engineers failing to show up on 3 occasions, i had no piece of mind with the laptop whatsoever where if it broke down again they would replace it. They had proven to me already that they wouldn`t replace it after numerous failed promises of another system so if it broke down again like it did i would be left high and dry by dell with them forcing me to take a refund which was far less than what i paid for it.

Ive not bought from Dell outlet directly so that maybe different, just don`t buy from any dell re-seller`s as you will only get refunded what the re-seller paid to them and not what you paid for the computer.

With a refurb they will not replace it with a brand new machine, they say they will replace it with like for like which is with another refurb but only if they have another in your exact spec. If they don`t have one in your spec and you have bought it from a dell re-seller then you will have a problem.

 

Sorry to hear you you had a bad time with refurbs stig guess im one of the lucky ones...

The only reason i was looking at re-sellers is because they dont sell alienware laptops at the dell outlet.
I have ordered from the outlet before,it was a xps m1530 and its been running sweet for 2 years it was basically brand new with all the disks....never had any problems with it.
Sounds to me like the re-sellers cut corners and leave alot of stuff out.

 

The majority of Dell re-sellers buy the machines direct from Dell as refurbs, they don`t touch the inside as they have already been refurbed by Dell. They just buy them at a decent price and sell them on for a bit of profit so their is nothing really to cut corners with.

Like i said above, buying direct from the Dell Outlet is probably ok. Its when you come to buy from a re-seller, if the machine goes wrong a few months after you bought it or a year later and you then want a refund from Dell, they will only refund you what the re-seller paid to them and not what you paid to the re-seller so you could lose quite a bit of money.

For a refurb, my advice is to stick with Dell directly and don`t buy from a re-seller as it could give you a big headache if something went wrong at a later date.

 

Just recieved a recovery CD from the guy I bought from today. Its a copied Vista?! Surely this isn't legal right? I mean, the authentication sticker is missing from the laptop, and he sends me a copied recovery cd. I have no way of telling if the Windows 7 on my machine is legal or not. Any advice?

 

Maybe its a Upgradeable vista to windows 7....did you get the serial with the cd?
As for it being legal,I have no idea m8 but I would'nt worrie if its just a copy of the recovery disk for your machine.

 

Nope, no serial mate. I definitely won't be happy if its an upgraded version, would you? I've msged the guy anyway, see what he says.

 

My os was upgraded from vista to w7 and i have had no problems with it,hope you get the serial cuz you will need it.

 

On the contrary, they do cut corners whn they buy from DELL as refurbs the same way DELL does with its supplyers.

For instance, DELL can get a cheaper windows OS licence cos they promise to provide support for Microsoft's product. This leaves MS the hassle of taking the support calls for MS customers (yea, they do have call centers for Os's, MS Word, etc.)

These resellers buy the refurb units without any OS sometimes and some of em are known to remove Serv tags as well! They buy it a lot cheaper than we can afford to buy from DELL outlet.

 

Hi mate,

Just stumbled across your post and just thought I'd give you an update. I work at NDC and generally the stickers are used on very new models when we can't source new keyboards. As the items we get from Dell come from all over Europe, a lot of them generally do come with foreign keyboards. However 99% of the time we stock UK keyboards and can change them over.

When we don't have Alienware UK keyboards, we list the items with "semi-backlit" keyboards instead of "fully backlit" and always oput a link pointing to this:
http://www.ndc.co.uk/images/lids/awkb.jpg
And the price of the laptop usually reflects this.

Currently however the Alienware M15x and M17x are all being shipped from us with the proper fully backlit UK keyboards as a standard as we have plenty of stock of the UK keyboards, the only ones we are struggling with at the moment are M11x's, for which we haven't managed to source the UK keyboards yet. We do usually have a few at hand and can offer them as optional upgrades.

I know its not ideal having stickers on the keyboard but at least you don't have to put up with dodgy foreign characters confusing you! And the savings you make on the price of the laptop should more than make up for it!