Disappointed in Alienware
A few weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my two year old PC. It was still serving me well and it was running World of Warcraft fine, but I thought that two years was long enough in hardware time to warrant an upgrade. So far, I had always bought my PC’s from Dell but this time, I decided to go more hardcore and order one from Alienware.
My first disappointment was that it took much longer for them to ship it than my initial reading of the web site led me to believe. I thought I would get my new computer in about five days, but after that time, my payment hadn’t even been processed yet. After that, it took more days assemble it, then run the tests and finally ship it. Overall, two weeks separated the time where I confirmed my order online and the time where it was delivered to my home.
Unfortunately, my new PC never worked properly: after one or two hours, it would completely lock up and I had to cold reboot it. And because of that, Vista didn’t get a chance to dump any kind of meaningful information, so viewing the Event Log produced absolutely no clue about what was happening. This was absolutely maddening.
I contacted Alienware’s Technical support and a long email dance started. They started by offering me generic advice and then became more and more technical as it turned out that none of their solutions worked. In the latest stages, they were asking me to update my BIOS (which voids your warranty) and other crazy things such as changing the clock timings of my memory. The more I interacted with the technicians, the more obvious it was to me that they had absolutely no idea what they were doing and that all these recommendations were actually complete shots in the dark.
Of course, none of them worked and my system continued to crash every two hours or so. At the height of my frustration and running out of options, I decided to start the cancellation process, something I wasn’t exactly looking forward to since it appeared that not only would I have to pay the shipping costs (which they charged me for $170 on the way in) but they also featured a 15% restocking fee (something I would fight tooth and nail since I really doubt restocking fees apply to defective units).
I also started doing more research on my side and just as I was about to finalize the return process, I finally found the miracle fix.
All I needed to do was to go to Vista’s Power Options and check the “High Performance” option, as shown below:
Once I did this, my computer stopped crashing.
Overall, I find it absolutely unacceptable that a company whose core business is gaming and high-end PC’s was unable to diagnose such a simple problem, but what is even worse is that they didn’t even catch this problem in their hundreds of tests that they claim they subject the machines to before they ship them to customers.
I’m going to keep this machine since it now works correctly, but this is definitely the first and the last time that I ever buy something from Alienware.
Comments (16)
That's weird. I thought Dell purchased Alienware. I wonder how that machine would behave with Ubuntu on it.
I hate to say this, but Alienware is notorious for making low quality PCs. In their pursuit of gaming benchmarks they overclock and cut corners to the point their machines are overheated, power sucking monsters. The laptops are particularly bad. My guess is "High performance" in Vista means "never ever enable any power saving features". Does this mean your monitor never turns itself off now?
No, it only impacts power consumption while the PC is running, as far as I know. Hopefully, it means that whenever the CPU is working, the motherboard gets full power, which it probably wasn't with the medium setting.
It was something in the operating system. I would have just wrote it off to a hardware problem in the past and demanded a replacement. Now I would have tried another operating system and saw if that did anything... which it looks like it would have.
I had the exact same problem with Failienware. However, changing the power plan wasn't a magical fix for me. They kept promising a magical BIOS upgrade that would correct it (the problem was allegedly an incompatibility issue between the memory and the 790i motherboard). The BIOS fix was always "just about ready, in a couple days or two"... that went on for about a month (they also had me try a whole slew of memory timing changes as well). Finally, I decided to cut my losses and send it back. It's insulting that their so-called battery of tests didn't find this when I encountered the issue within thirty minutes of first turning it on. Anyway, your machine should work fine regardless of power options, so I don't think changing the power plan to high performance should be considered a fix. I hate to say it, but I'd be highly surprised if you don't continue to have issues with the machine...
I've had very similar issues with my Shuttle PC (AMD with nForce4 chipset, nearly three years old). Unfortunately, it would be nice to not have to be in High Performance mode all the time. This means that you won't be able to take advantage of any of the fancy things that will ramp down your power consumption when the system is idle. This means that your computer will use a lot more energy if you leave it on all the time as compared to a machine that works properly. A well-behaved machine should seriously reduce its power consumption when idle by automatically lowering the clock rate.
Lars: I haven't had any single lock-up in almost a week now, so this seems to have fixed the problem. Tim: Yes, I was a bit sad to have to do that but my computer only on while I'm playing, and hibernating the rest of the time, so it's not too bad.
I will go for a (new?) macbook pro. I'll report about it.
I built my own the last time, but I certainly sympathise with this guy: h t t p://securitywithspeed.com/2008/10/i-hate-building-pcs/ The best part of my system is the Lian Li case; it kicks butt. That's how boring PCs have become.
hmmm...lack of power to the motherboard you say. I think 'Balanced' power plan should work for any PC built correctly. Check your new video-card's wattage to your power supply's 12V rail wattage.
Alienware indeed is owned by Dell. They are overpriced, at least here in Europe and certainly not an option since they seem to like nVidia chipsets which have proven not very reliable in their latest incarnations. And what's that with "upgrading the BIOS voids the warranty", that's crazy! I also prefer to build my own PC, it can be done in less than 2 hours which is still acceptable from my point of view. Pas de chance C
stop the games and prefer a Mac for working
Cedric, Contrast this with my apple experience. I had a Macbook Pro which was 13 months old. This laptop took quite an abuse from me when I dropped it twice and the aluminum edges were dinged and out of shape. The last time I dropped it, my LCD display started acting up and finally one day it quit showing any video. (I know the laptop was fine since it would display properly through the DVI to External monitor). I wasn't in any curious mood to muck around by fixing it myself (Macbook Pro has close to 25 screws to open the case!). I took it to the local apple store (the first time I ever took a computer of mine to a repair shop). Apple had me schedule an appointment to their genius bar through their website. I walked into the store to be greeted by a genius( he looked more like Incrediboy from Incredibles :-) He was super friendly and ran some diagnostics. Then he gave me the bad news which I was worried about - the lcd panel cost $800 to replace including labor. Then he gave me the good news, since I was only one month out of the warranty, he said he would fix it for free. He also saw the other cosmetic blemishes and said, he will take care of them for free as well. After one week, the Macbook Pro gets shipped back via DHL to my home with a new chassis looking like brank spankin new! My cost - $0. Ive always bought PC's all my life. After this incident, I think Apple has a new customer! (And did I tell you VMware Fusion runs Windows Server 2008 like a charm? I don't do Vista anymore) :-)
I bought an Alienware a year and a half ago and it was probably the worst PC decision I have ever made. First off, any dates they say about when they will ship your computer are a complete fabrication. I doubt anyone has ever received a computer on time from them. The case is very clean but doing upgrades is a nightmare. Finally, the power supply gave out after a year. Unfortunately, due to the nature of power supply problems, it can be very difficult to diagnose a power supply falure vs. a motherboard problem. Anyway, to make a long story short, I have gone back to building my own PCs. It's a lot less expensive and I put very good components in them.
Sadly, my company is in love with Alienware, in spite of much evidence that the machines are crappy. We've had 2 Alienware laptops crap out on us, and 5 out of 7 Alienware workstations have had major problems of one sort or another, up to and including replacing the motherboards in 2 of them. Mine is the oldest of the lot (2 years), and while it ran OK for the first 18 months, started acting flakey, so I pulled the main harddrive and attempted to reinstall Windows XP, it proved impossible, due to the poorly supported motherboard RAID controller. So I 'upgraded' to Vista, which worked ... but now the video performance sucks because the Vista drivers suck. And then one morning I came in and the motherboard was dead, for no apparent reason. On the other hand, I can't say enough nice things about the Dell WFP 3007s monitors that came with them ... I just wish I could justify buying one for my home machine...
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