this is a short review, which I will update as i further in the game.
Monday the 26th i placed my order over the phone, a rep named George helped me with my purchase. I checked the phases on AW's site and I progressed to phase 3 (before the change to 10 phases). I woke up the next morning around noon and had to check it again... phase 9 over night, I was super excited!
I was getting worried Tuesday the 28th when all day it was stuck at phase 9, especially when I know FedEx usually picks up around 5-7pm. sure enough at 6pm eastern I checked the phases out and i was phase 12! Whoa.. I thought I couldn't lose. I checked one last time around 6:30 just cause I was at work and I had nothing better to do. It put me back to phase 9 and I picked up the phone to call to see what happened to it... I looked harder at the page and saw that i was on the second to last step cause they had changed it from 14 to 10! WOW so here I am with a tracking number from FedEx and an arrival date of 10/4, thats Tuesday! If it does arrive on Monday that would been a week exactly from the date I placed the order... lets just hope the machine has as good luck as I did in the phases game! I will keep you updated with how the machine arrives!
THIS MACHINE ROCKS! although the Fn key's dont work and I cant seem to get the media center to work on the front display...pm me if you can help
Post Review Update 4/08:
Well, the machine is no longer with me. I have moved onto a m9700. I loved the m7700 until the day I had to let it go. It was a great machine, ran Guildwars like a champ and multi-boxed Diablo II like no other
. Unfortunately I kept running into problems with my graphics card artifacting, I had to get two replacement graphics cards within the year I owned the machine.
I got very frustrated with Alienwares' Technical Support Department until I was escalated to a superb gentlemen by the name of Marco. Marco was great, him and the COO of Alienware are all that kept me around. Marco would call me when he said he would and would be in his office the same. I had to send my machine in for repairs because it started to smoke, Marco called me to let me know that the motherboard had burnt, the CPU had fused itself to the heatsink, the graphics card had died, plus the internals of the machine had melted all the plastic in the case. After they received it they worked on it almost the same day and Marco returned a call to me with an update stating what they had found and that they had already got my machine up and running again. He said they replaced both of my HDD"s and panels A, B and C, I was impressed.
I got my machine back with nice new panels and all the others, it fired right up. I usually let my machines run idle for around 250-500 hours before I do any benchmarks or gaming. During this period, well about 5 hours into it my machine bricked again, but this time without the smoke. I called Marco and he said he would get back with me, he said he was about fed up with the troubles I had gone through. While I waited a friend who runs another forum gave me the COO's personal email to "voice" my story to him. The next day Alex called me personally to tell me that with the recent acquisition by Dell that Alienware's components were about to get much more reliable and he felt that I deserved the new m9700. He gave me the go ahead to "spend a few extra bucks" if I wanted. This is what being a Computer company should be about, hardware fails..it just does. I don't hold a computer company responsible for bad hardware as long as they keep up their end of the deal with the service. I can go get a Samsung HDD anywhere, but who deals with my warranty is a whole other story.
Enough of that, the machine was awesome. Although I couldn't recommend this particular model to anyone because of the grief it caused me and being near 3 years later, all the problems it caused everyone else, but I would highly recommend Alienware.
Monday the 26th i placed my order over the phone, a rep named George helped me with my purchase. I checked the phases on AW's site and I progressed to phase 3 (before the change to 10 phases). I woke up the next morning around noon and had to check it again... phase 9 over night, I was super excited!
I was getting worried Tuesday the 28th when all day it was stuck at phase 9, especially when I know FedEx usually picks up around 5-7pm. sure enough at 6pm eastern I checked the phases out and i was phase 12! Whoa.. I thought I couldn't lose. I checked one last time around 6:30 just cause I was at work and I had nothing better to do. It put me back to phase 9 and I picked up the phone to call to see what happened to it... I looked harder at the page and saw that i was on the second to last step cause they had changed it from 14 to 10! WOW so here I am with a tracking number from FedEx and an arrival date of 10/4, thats Tuesday! If it does arrive on Monday that would been a week exactly from the date I placed the order... lets just hope the machine has as good luck as I did in the phases game! I will keep you updated with how the machine arrives!
THIS MACHINE ROCKS! although the Fn key's dont work and I cant seem to get the media center to work on the front display...pm me if you can help
Post Review Update 4/08:
Well, the machine is no longer with me. I have moved onto a m9700. I loved the m7700 until the day I had to let it go. It was a great machine, ran Guildwars like a champ and multi-boxed Diablo II like no other
. Unfortunately I kept running into problems with my graphics card artifacting, I had to get two replacement graphics cards within the year I owned the machine.I got very frustrated with Alienwares' Technical Support Department until I was escalated to a superb gentlemen by the name of Marco. Marco was great, him and the COO of Alienware are all that kept me around. Marco would call me when he said he would and would be in his office the same. I had to send my machine in for repairs because it started to smoke, Marco called me to let me know that the motherboard had burnt, the CPU had fused itself to the heatsink, the graphics card had died, plus the internals of the machine had melted all the plastic in the case. After they received it they worked on it almost the same day and Marco returned a call to me with an update stating what they had found and that they had already got my machine up and running again. He said they replaced both of my HDD"s and panels A, B and C, I was impressed.
I got my machine back with nice new panels and all the others, it fired right up. I usually let my machines run idle for around 250-500 hours before I do any benchmarks or gaming. During this period, well about 5 hours into it my machine bricked again, but this time without the smoke. I called Marco and he said he would get back with me, he said he was about fed up with the troubles I had gone through. While I waited a friend who runs another forum gave me the COO's personal email to "voice" my story to him. The next day Alex called me personally to tell me that with the recent acquisition by Dell that Alienware's components were about to get much more reliable and he felt that I deserved the new m9700. He gave me the go ahead to "spend a few extra bucks" if I wanted
. This is what being a Computer company should be about, hardware fails..it just does. I don't hold a computer company responsible for bad hardware as long as they keep up their end of the deal with the service. I can go get a Samsung HDD anywhere, but who deals with my warranty is a whole other story.Enough of that, the machine was awesome. Although I couldn't recommend this particular model to anyone because of the grief it caused me and being near 3 years later, all the problems it caused everyone else, but I would highly recommend Alienware.
