Area 51 m7700 Rant (D900T)

First, this is a rant, a venting if you will... Feel free to offer suggestions/comments/etc.

Back in Febuary of 05, my boss offered to buy me a laptop. It was to be a negotiation for what I was going to get, and I went in with a fully pimped Alienware to set the bar high, and let him weasel me down to a base Alienware system. I ended up with a nice 7700 with 3ghz/512mb dual HD. 'Woohoo!!!' I proclaimed. The order was submitted, and the waiting game begins. The excitement faded as it took 2 months, 6 days for the system to ship, and my bleeding edge excellent system was now 2 months out of date. Oh well I say, I'll live. The reason I got the laptop initially was so I could take a vacation a month later and have it with me to handle offsite support/etc. Instead of having this system, I had to rent a laptop for a week (cost me a few hundred bucks, oh well). I finally get the system and was happy with it... until December...

The motherboard fails. The system has vital work documents on it, so I have to spend money on external hd cages for it to get the documents off of it. Not a big deal, the money spent was less than the headache it would have been to restore from backups a month later when the system returns.

So it's January of 06, and I have my system back, and all is going well. I've become weary of the hardware used in one of these systems and decide to buy the 3 year extended warranty. A couple weeks later(after having had the system for all of a month), the battery stops charging, but I need the system to hit some deadlines at work, so I keep using it. March rolls around, deadlines have been met, so I send the system back in to have the motherboard replaced again. I suggest that they take a look at the power supplies too, but they state that that can't possibly be the problem. It takes what seems like an eternity for them to get it back to me, but it was probably only a week or two... I get it back, and things are looking good.

Roll forward to November of 2007. The system has been running perfectly for me until it starts having graphics corruption and system freezes. I give it a quick blow to clean out the fans and it's back to normal for a few weeks, until I go to take it on a trip and the batteries have stopped charging again. I have massive amounts of backed up work to do, so I keep chugging on and use it as a portable desktop as I'm now tethered to wall outlets. Today I call up and tomorrow will be sending the system back for 'diagnosis'. They'll be replacing the motherboard again for certain, but they're finally willing to take both power supplies, and both batteries to do a full look at the system.

Anyone else experienced this sort of problem with one of these systems? Has Alienware ever made good on one these Piece of crap systems? I got this originally so that I could be productive and work from home and while on the road, but it's caused me more headaches than a case of cheap vodka. I only have another year or so on my warranty, and when it fails at that point, I'm walking away from Alienware for good, if this system has been an example of how they treat their customers.

Indeed, it's still under warranty. I've shipped it back today, and when I receive it back I'll likely just sell it for what I can get and use that as a down payment on a system from another vendor. Unless, of course, they replace it with something not clevo based.

I do understand that the failure rate was not directly Alienware's fault... but that doesn't release them from being responsible for making the situation right.