Serious M15x Issues! A $1,700 pile of crap?

So my M15x is only 3 months old, and already it is just completely wrecked. The only things I have installed on it are games I have bought off of Steam for the most part (other than Nvidia drivers, Mozilla Firefox, and other certified software), so there is no way there is a malware issue and yet I have constant freezing even AFTER dell replaced the video card after they diagnosed that as my issue (it was not, apparently)

The on screen display driver has to be reinstalled every time I start the computer or else none of the things on the media bar appear on the screen such as volume, steal mode options, brightness, etc...

The backlit keyboard, media bar, and power button flash from the custom colors to white randomly.

Running diagnostics mode has frozen my computer any time I have tried to run it.

And like I said, dell support has personally come to my house and replaced parts and still can't find an issue.

So now I am sending it in, and 20 bucks says they send it back and it still sucks.

I was really impressed by the computer at first, and now it makes me want to punch someone in the face.

 

In my experience the M15x works well if you keep away from some of the Dell software.

There seem to be issues with quite a few of the Dell utilities.

This is made worse by Dell support not seeming to know about some of the standard bugs and so they try and replace hardware to fix them.

The OSD utility has been flakey for me as well - I installed the later version and it seems stable now.

The latest version of the light controller firmware is buggy (in fact I think it was withdrawn from the Dell website) in my case the alien head on the front/back of the machine randomly goes dark - the earlier version worked a lot better, I assume Dell will eventually issue a fixed version

The bootable diagnostics basically doesn't work - it was obviously not tested. It will hang after showing color bars awaiting keyboard input

The windows based one however seems to work

Running the bootable diagnostics on battery will report a bad LCD (cannot change brightness). It's lying, but Dell doesn't know this and will ship you a new LCD/Graphics card to try and fix it

 

Hi Everyone,

Since I have personally experienced these issues, I wanted to offer some more information.

I can back this up. The latest firmware for AlienFX seems to have issues installing, and it personally took it 3 tries on my M15x to successfully upgrade. However, once that was successful, I have only had a few minor issues. It seems that if you use a saved profile from a previous version of AlienFX, it combined with the new firmware causes the Alienheads to flicker. Generating a fresh profile from the software fixes this problem (at least for me it did). I still occasionally have an issue where some of the lights just go out, but launching AlienFX and reloading the profile solves it. Dell has not pulled this update from the support site for the M15x. They did (however) pull it from the M17x. It is still available, and BatBoy has recommended to not use the latest version until the bugs have been worked out.

The Alienware diagnostics should work. If you are getting the hang at the color bar screen, this is not normal. My M15x has suffered through 2 motherboard replacements (one was caused by my own stupidity), where it first worked, and then it did not. My original M15x had no problems with the diagnostics, and could run them with no issue. The first replacement board exhibited the problems motioned by ozoc. The lockup occurs as soon as you press a key on the keyboard (which is what the colorbar screen tells you to do). If you don't press anything, the diag will eventually time-out and take you back to a blue screen. But since you need to press a key to exit, it still locks. The Dell techs identified the problem as an issue with the LCD (wrong), and when I asked them about the diags failing on battery (also mentioned by ozoc), this confirmed the LCD issue in their minds. So, they sent out a second tech with a new motherboard and LCD. Fortunately, the tech they sent decided to try the motherboard first (as the problem only occurred with the new board), and that fixed it (I still have my original LCD). It seems the colorbar section of MATS (pre-boot assessment) is supposed to test the LCD, and a failure there indicates a problem. However, when the laptop is running on battery, the power management system takes control of the LCD backlight, preventing the diags from accessing it, causing a "failure."

My major point here, is the bootable diagnostics (MATS pre-boot assessment) should not be failing (as long as you are plugged in). This may seem like a minor issue, but Dell/Alienware does not know why it fails here. This could be a non-specific symptom of something more serious. Whatever is causing the failure may cause something more serious later on down the road. This is why I was insistent with Dell about fixing it. My current original and current board does/did not fail these tests, and neither should yours. If you are having these symptoms, I would suggest you contact Dell before your warranty expires, just in case. It would suck if a few days/months after your warranty expires, that the problem surfaces and keeps you from using your M15x.

Good luck!

 

I'm generally happy with the machine but agreed, there are some real stupid issues in the software.

Also regarding the LightingFX.. Here's something the Project manager for alienware support software should hear..

1 Don't release BUGGY SOFTWARE unless you call it a BETA.. WE ARE NOT YOUR TESTERS, WE ARE YOUR CUSTOMERS.

2 The keyboard lighting stays on when you close the screen. This is absurd and unacceptable flaw in the functionality. Does anyone on the software team actually use an M15x? How can you miss this?

And some points regarding the general pre-flight software package (what you get with the machine as new)

3 There are a range of flaws in the software design (I'm not going to list them here). Just one example is a 16GB recovery partition which is storing 4GB of data.. Why waste 12GB of real-estate at the FASTEST part of the hard-drive?

4 At least Defrag (or better, optimise!) the hard-drive before you send it out.

5 Why not include some Demos from Nvidia (they are free and give instant gratification regarding graphic performance). If you're going to include crapware like Cyberlink and McAfee then why not include those demos?

If anyone knows the guys at Alienware, let me know. I'd like to design them a proper pre-flight package for their All powerful range. The one I got was designed badly and incorporated elements from older Alienware rigs..

Sorry for the rant, but for a boutique brand like this I'd expect that they hire better people for this kind of thing..