Do not buy Alienware

I used to buy Dell both for personal use and for my company, but will never do business with them again. I purchased a loaded Alienware M17x last year with all the next day support and extended warranties that you can buy. When the box came, one of the fans wasn't running right. It took 3 calls and two techs to fix it. After they replaced the fan, my speakers were never the same (fuzzy playback). Three weeks ago, the box siezed up and wouldn't boot. I called into support and was walked through pulling the hard disks and swaping them out to diagnose the issue. I told the guy that this was a work computer and I had a lot of data and software on the box that I didn't want to lose. Net is he sent me one drive which didn't solve the problem, but did cause me to lose my data. Next his supervisor send me two disks which also didn't solve the problem. Finally, the the tech that came out to replace the motherboard broke another circuit board when he was replacing the motherboard. He called me back later to tell me that I had to send the machine in and it would be 7-10 business days to get it back. Dell/Alienware support is so bad that I will never do business with them again and the quality of the product is total crap. Alienware might have been a good company before it was bought by Dell, but not anymore.

The sad thing is I have had good luck with Dell up until last year. I have an XPS M1710 that is still alive and kicking and I always got good service for it. I think the issue with Alienware is that Dell support hasn't fully integrated it in. The guys that are coming out to the house just don't seem to be very well trained. Don't get me wrong, I like the machine, just not the support. It will be interesting to see if I get a response back from any of the execs I sent an email to.