Poll: Owners-Rate your Alienware Experience - Page 5

nk I havent recieved mine yet but so far EVERYTHING has been smooth had my computer built and shipped out in 7 days. I am supposed to get it on thursday 14 days after the day I ordered it. and it was custom built and everything if you dont think thats amazing than your messed up in the head just dont go bashing alienware like that cause like daegras said were all happy with our purchases and dont care what you have to say

n00b 101,
I think you had some very bad luck and that is too bad. I was upset with Alienwares horrible customer service, but with time i found that I had had a unique experience among my contacts that had also bought needful things from the Miami mothership. I have the new model and I have had a couple of very minor problems with cosmetics and the XP not having a good registration number. But, as the months pass, I have found myself feeling very happy with my purchase as my laptop has turned out to be as reliable as the sun coming up in the morning and runs everything I give it at full speed with nary a hiccup or need to reboot constantly.
What I have learned from this is that its not always the basic parts put into a machine that makes it a thing to be coveted, a lot of what you pay for here is the way they put those parts together. I have compared my benchmark testing from Sandra and others and found very few computers that were comparable, especially if you are talking laptops. There are a couple of laptops that test faster than the Area51m as provided to the media by manufacturers and time will tell if they can hold that small lead. price wise the new Dell is probably the cheapest of the bunch in that small performance class and have you seen what they want for one. The price being quoted is also without many of the options that are on my computer as standard. All in all, this normally pessimistic user of computer hardware would buy another one and recommend one to his mom. Nuf said!

I am not a original Area-51m owner bought second, Aurora was nice enough to allow me to download drivers. I was disappointed that Alienware does not archive the XP recovery CD's for their products. MS desktop Engineer was very helpfull to activate my XP even I do not have a recovery CD, the problem is I am not able to reinstall if for some reason I need to, that is where the archive will come in handy.

Where can I down load the manual for area-51m, also how do you get an external mouse (ps2) to work. I appreciate if any member can give me some pointers.
Thanks ... Emil

I thought I wanted an area 51...that is until I spoke with customer service. The 9 month same as cash credit card is a joke and poorly understood by their own people. If just the order process is so poor, how bad can additional service be? Any room for optimism here folks?

Redlined:

What kind of issues did you have with Alienware Financing?

Here is a link that may give you more information:

http://www.alienware.com/sub_pages/financing.aspx

If you had issues with the Agent you spoke to, you can ask to speak to another agent.

Juan, I was "approved" Wed AM, as of this moment your firm has not yet even shipped the "overnight" documents. Looks like maybe Mon...hardly over night or expedited service. All this aggravation for 9 months same as cash. What a joke

In my experience, none at all.
I encountered the very worst examples of sales, accounting and managers possible, It took the salesman that took my order over the phone about 90 secs a to
start trying to trim the fat from my wallet,
If I had not done my homework beforehand he would have pocketed the extra 300 dollars he tried to charge me. When I called him on it, he showed his lack of practice in backpedaling while studying the price list and then adding component prices by hand,.
You would have sworn that AW didn't have computers for sales staff, it was his way of getting his head around an explanation of his errror.
Then to be safe about the payment arrangements, I gave them my bankcard info and figured that with such a fine company, they would earn their sales commisions and my work was done. hehe!
Their extremely paranoid accounting team canceled my order and rudely told me that my Visa combo with checking card was no good and i would have to do better than that. That was it , they had lost interest at that point and my dream computer was still just a dream.
I called my bank and asked how this could happen, the bank reported over 40,000 dollars was available to the card holder and no, AW had not even tried to process my charge slip at the bank and no phone conferences had been logged.
So now I am working harder than anyone but the night janitor to get this machine ordered and I had been ignored lied to, disrespected about an imaginary security concern and it still wasn't on order.
Finally I just went down to the bank and pulled 2500 out, bought a money order and sent it , the pre -computer days way. How ironic that one of the premier computer companies in the world can't figure out how to transfer funds in a reliable and efficent manner without making us into little con artists . After all this, my story of abuse would continue until the actual day I got it. As long as its just me and the machine, things are gonna be great, the idea of dealing with their customer service still make be break into a rash. lol.Oh yeah, when they direct you to customer service because of issue like i had, you just end up doing their job too. I wrote them a 3 page letter and sent it twice with all the names, numbers and damages occured by me. They sent me a promise to look into such a terrible thing.and they would get back to me. Well its nigh on July and my computer was assembled in Feburary and I am still waiting. Hey, it could still happpen , right?

Thanks for your reply Winter. Based on lots of feedback here (and elsewhere) I will buy the machine. But I am concerned with any additional support needs. The apparent average intellectual capacity of most everyone in customer service/finance has been scary. I mean really deplorable. They must hire only from the Morons Are Us emplyment agency. The "instant" approval and "overnight" delivery of documents really means an additional 6 days before receiving documents and 10 days BEFORE your order is acknowledged or entered into production. Discussing these issues with staff is like teaching them a foreign language starting with their first word....of English that is. Obviously sales has never been told what their web site proclaims, but rest assured they refer to the American General Bank as if it is a deity. This freaking deity and the inherent stupidity of the company's infrastructure will cost me a 10 day lag time to start building the computer...all because I wish to enjoy their 9 month same as cash policy. It's hardly an inspiring sales method to promote a high end product. Is Sager et al taking notes?

Hi redlined,
I am sure they are. But I think if a comparatively small company like Alienware has allowed their customer service department to lapse into disrepair, then how's a giant like Dell gonna control the quality of this same dept. when its located in India, as many of Dell's are. Sager very well may be in the position to become the cutting edge provider but I think it may be too late.
The giants have stopped and looked around and realized there was mucho dinero to be made in the very high end laptop market and with their almost unlimited resources they will have many of the hardware providers like Nvidea and Creative getting in line to fill much larger orders of components then ever possible at Alienware or Sager. Money talks and these subcontracters know who has the money.
This already has occured with the delay experienced by Alienware with the current video update for A51m.
Ati was busy gearing up and started shipping the new card for Dell's new gamer laptop. Alienware has reported that the entire industry is copying their idea of removable graphics modules, which means even more competetion for same.
They also have reported that with the shift to PCI express bus technologly this year and them being required to not have a phase in period, the upgrades would be even harder to come by. You may have ordered as I, about 6 months too soon.
The newer laptop with the newer bus technology will get prorioty on parts, drivers, upgrades , ect. They put their effort into the money making part of the business which is always the current models and anything invested in past model upkeep is of course microscopic in comparision.
The way of the world and always the nightmare for a end user wanting to maintain a technical edge.

Received my lappie about 10 days ago, very happy with it To summarise my 'Alienware experience', the order took about 10 days - had a slight wait for the 9700. The website order process status was out of date - stuck on phase 3 for ages then all of a sudden, there it was!

3.4Ghz 1Gb RAM
ATi 9700
16.1 " screen

The laptop looks superb, graphics fantastic (Far Cry is a dream, BFV rocks - both at max detail). No dead pixels. Backpack is excellent. Have 'cycled' battery several times.

Only minor issues so far: arrived with no security patches/hotfixes on - would have thought this would have been standard - but no probs, updated OS myself. A few crashes, but prob due to either graphics drivers or more likely WinXP SP2 RC2!

Overall, expensive yes....... BUT WORTH IT! I use a Dell Inspiron at work and could have saved $ by going for a top end Dell - but AW was my choice

Congratulations Carbon...that's a sweet machine. Welcome to the Boards.

Roger that Carbon,
Sounds like a hot setup and you should be happy with it, for sure!
Welcome to the show!

wow, nice system you got there. I would love to hear more about how things go, as time passes! keep us updated, and dont hesitate to ask questions!

THeir 15% restocking fee blows...

Say What?

Im happy so far

I am currently in phase 5, but I am happy with the help I have gotten up to this point. There was going to be a 5 week wait on the 4x dvd+/- rw drive but I got upgraded free of charge to an 8x dvd+- rw drive which is not even an option on the website. They said my laptop should ship in about 10 days. So I cant complain yet. We will see when the system gets here.