My friend just had a bad run-in with alienware...

One of my friends ordered his area51-m the same day that I did. He got back from a 8 day trip two weeks ago and when he turned his notebook on it would not turn on. He figured the battery was dead so he plugged his ac adaptor in and that didnt work either. I brought over my two batteries and ac adaptor and none of those worked either. He called alienware and they basicly had him do everything under the sun to try and fix the problem, even removing the keyboard to check the RAM (as if RAM just goes bad like that and causes a computer to not even be charged by the AC adaptor lol). Anyways, they were supposed to send a FedEx truck to his house (this was like 4 days ago), but twice it came at the wrong time and he wasn't there. So, he called alienware to tell them that he was going to just drop it off instead. Well, the problem is that he also goes to college in a week and needs the notebook for school. Well, its pretty obvious that it will take around a month or longer to get it back from the Depot service and that just doesn't work. So, he called and requested that they speed things up and not let it sit for five days like mine. The guy on the phone with customer service basicly had the power to do nothing so he requested to talk to a manager or someone higher up. They transfered him to someone else who was higher up and he explained the situation. He said that it would take 13 days to do this. Well, Alienware told me that 14 days is the MAXIMUM that it should take to fix stuff, I guess 1 day must be a big deal for them. Then my friend explained how he needed them to backup the hard drive because he wasn't able to do that and that he has a lot of important stuff on there. Alienware told him that they cannot do that because the law requires them to format the hard drive before they fix it. They did say that they could just fix the computer using a new hard drive and send it back with the old one too. That way, he could just swap them and send the new one back and everything would be ok. Well, the guy on the phone said that they would have to also charge him a 15 dollar restocking fee. My friend explained how rediculous that is considering he paid for a 2800 dollar computer from them and they cannot waive a 15 dollar restocking fee that is an issue only because their computer didnt work the way its supposed to. He proceeded to lay into the alienware guy about how that 15 dollar fee could cause them to lose thousands of dollars in the future from his business and other people when he tells them how crappy the customer service at alienware is (some of our friends are looking to buy high-end laptops). His cell phone died though so he has to call back. I'll post whatever alienware does once we find out more. All I have to say is its kind of crappy how they put customers with faulty computers on this huge wait and really don't do anything to speed the process up. I experieced that when mine was dead on arrival with a faulty motherboard and now my friend has it happen to him. I've also read tons of stories of the same thing on here and on resellerratings.com. Unlike what some people think, it is not acceptable for them to merely fix the computer, after all, that is their JOB, its not like they are doing anyone a favor or anything. Its just sad that Dell drives over to my other friend's house and fixes his screen AND motherboard (it now works flawlessly by the way), but yet alienware takes over a month with this stuff and blames it on testing and stuff. Its already been shown that testing is pretty worthless when people are getting computers that are dead on arrival or have graphics cards that aren't working like some people have had on here. I'm sure that some of that is from shipping but when a computer is boxed up as good as the area51m's are, I doubt its all due to shipping. Alienware really needs to improve customer service, maybe some people are OK with this stuff, but the majority of us out there arent. There is no reason for a company that sells $3000+ computers to take this amount of time on fixing them. Once again, my friend's 2 year old dell was fixed in less than a day, not to mention that was the same day he called about it. My cousin also had a guy from HP drive to his college in the middle of the night and fix his. Both of theirs work great and they sure didn't need any kind of "testing", not to mention they didn't have their hard drives formatted. My point to this little rant is that alienware needs to improve things very quick because its getting ridiculous. If I keep hearing about these types of things, I'm taking my 30,000+ worth of future business to someone else for sure.

I know what you mean, I love my alienware laptop, but their customer service and the lack of care that they show customers with faulty products is just plain wrong.

None of those justify waiting for over a month to get it fixed, having a DOA, or having your 2800 computer crap out unexpectedly. As for you waiting longer than us, thats even crappier, I feel bad for you there. Just a note, even though the rep comes on the forums, many of us are STILL waiting a month or longer so that is irrelevant.