Alienware Not Power Enough For Humans
May 16, 2008 by Neil
Humans are wanting more from Alienware, our Human allies tell Neil:
The last place I would expect to hear even a glimmer of doubt about the performance potential of gaming PCs would be Alienware. Yet Alienware’s Marc Diana spills that 32-bit machines just aren’t cutting it at the pure performance level …
Patrick of Locust VAlley NY (12/28/05):
I was lured into buying a very expensive laptop. The model is the area 51m 7700. The reason I bought the machine was because Alienware states that the machine has an upgradable/user removable video card. I recently called the company to enquire about a price for a later model video card. I was told that my system is not configured to handle that video card.
Timothy of Breckenridge CO (12/26/05):
I ordered a workstation from Alienware that cost $4,200. Four days after I recieved it there was a software problem with the mup.sys driver that prevented the computer from booting into Windows. I was told that the only way to fix this problem was downloading drivers from their website, and then putting them on a floppy disk.
Debra of Huntington, NY (12/7/05):
A customer service nightmare!! After being hounded by my 14-year-old to replace her old Dell laptop with the compact, hip ALIENWARE version, I spent over $2400 for a basic laptop. With a promise of a $600 rebate special and a $99 shipping rebate I felt a little better about the cost. Unfortunately, I have been trying to get the rebate forms from them for over 5 months.
Alienware has continued to screw me also. I purchased my first Alienware about a year and a half ago. Recently it died. The hard drives are corrupted and the computer will not even allow me to reformat the drives. I purchased two new drives to try an install from scratch and I have had no luck. Alienware offers no support for their claimed “top of the line computer and customer support”.
Purchased an Alienware Area51-m7700 along with the premium 3 year onsite warranty (about $3500 total) in March of 2005. After many delays, the 14 day turnaround turned into a month and I finally received at the end of April. Towards the end of summer I started calling tech support about my screen occasionally fading in and out and flickering.
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Without a doubt, Alienware is one of the worst companies I have had the displeasure of dealing with in my life. My 13-year old son, over my objections, chose this pathetic company to order his new gaming computer. 4 weeks after they eagerly took my money, no computer. No response to email questions. I called them and they gave me the B.S. story about how it needs to be checked and double-checked and how they make such a great system and how they refuse to send out an inferior product. As near as I can tell, they don’t send out any product at all. I cancelled the order and asked when I would get my money back. I was told my credit card would be refunded in full within 3-5 days. I caklled 7 work days later and still no refund. They told me that it would be 2 more days and promised to send me a conforming email. 5 days later, no email, no refund. I called and was again told 2-3 moere days and again was promised a confirming email. 7 days later, no email, no refund. In the meanwhile, we ordered a better computer from Dell and received it in 4 days, with free shipping. I knw that Dell bought Alienware but do not expect the customer service to be any better than it was before. Alienware is still staffed by incompetent, dishonet thieves. I still don’t have my money back, and am preparing to file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau and am looking into filing federal inter-state commerce fraud charges. Stay away from these maggots.
This computer was the worst purchase I have ever made, I wanted an Alienware laptop for several years after seeing them on display when Best Buy used to sale them. I started DJing my sophomore year of college and needed a computer that was powerful enough to run the software that my mixer uses. I took out a 3000 dollar loan to by what I thought would be a very nice laptop. I read reviews about alienware which were mostly negative and but figured like anything else, the people that have bad experiences are the ones that write reviews so I chose to ignore the reviews. I ordered my Mj12 7700i loaded with a 3.2 gig Pentium 4 processor with HT technology, 3 gig of RAM, and dual 80 gig processors in raid 0 format. (at the time this was very impressive) the computer ran great for about 8 months. When I hooked any type of audio device up to my laptop I heard a lot of background noise. Alienware said I could send it back to them and they could fix it, but I decided to just clean it up by adjusting my mixer. After the first 8 months I started having problems with my laptop cutting off after about 5 minutes. I worked with Aleinware trying to reinstall different things and get it working. It was eventually determined that I needed to send the computer back to alienware and pay 500 dollars to have it fixed. After receiving it back 2 months later I tried to use the Laptop and it did not work, I was told the motherboard had to be replaced. To make a long story short after sending the computer back and forth with alienware 4 more times I finally complained to the BBB and was contacted and told I could send the laptop to their VIP repairs at my own expense since I originally sent the laptop to them over a month ago, after pointing out that I have also sent it back 4 other times I was told I could send it to them and they would repair it for free. I sent the computer to them and got it back. It worked great! For 1 month, then the same thing happened. I opened the computer up and got a first hand look at their repairs, the original motherboard was still in there and wires had been taped to the motherboard with Electrical tape. So I now have a 3500 dollar paperweight, that is out of date and I got a total of 8 months of use out of. I would never recommend anyone buy a computer from this company, you will be better off buying a 300 dollar e-machine computer from Walmart.