Miscellaneous laptop discussions : Don't buy alienware.

Don't buy alienware.

Here is why:

Approximately last may, I purchased a Sentia 223 laptop from alienware, it cost considerably more than a comparable competing laptop, but I figured the extra speed and customizability would be worth it. It ended up being just shy of four grand canadian. Thinking ahead, I bought the 2 year extended warranty, reasoning that every other computer I have had either had problems right away, or just after the one year mark.

About a week ago, my computer started to spontaneously die during normal use, shortly after that it would fail to boot: In a nutshell, the 80 gig hard drive went. After a lengthy step by step (and multiple day) process to convince the tech support that the hard drive was in fact dying, they sent me a new one under warranty -and billed me for it-. Their reasoning is that the billing would not go through if I shipped them back the defective hard drive within five days of receiving the new one. This is my only computer at the moment, and I don't know about you but it takes a lot longer than five days to recover from a hard disk failure, especially when you are at work 10-12 hours a day. Doubly so when you have to order a special part online that will allow you to attempt to recover any data. I contacted their customer service department to request an extension so that I could wait until the part I need to connect the hard drive via the USB port arrives so I can get my data off. Note that I cannot ship the hard drive to them now without taking a hammer to it, as there is confidential data on it. I was informed by their customer service department that all they could do was send an e-mail to their rebate department with my request, but that there was no guarantee that I would not be billed.

After successfully installing the hard drive, the battery immediately died. The first time I had ever taken it out of the laptop after putting it in when the laptop was shipped to me was in order to remove the panel over the hard drive so that I could replace it. At first the system would see the hard drive, but would be unable to boot without the AC in, and the laptop would not charge past 7%. If I were to suddenly unplug the laptop (I did this once, it is how i first noticed the problem when I was moving the laptop to a cat5 cable because I needed to download the wireless driver) the laptop would immediately die.

Another call to technical support, another lengthy procedure wherein I was told to hot swap the battery (charge went from 7% to 1%), and then take the battery out and leave it out for 24 hours before placing it in the PC again and seeing if the battery would reboot, for lack of a better term. A few minutes ago, I get off the phone with tech support: The battery is not covered any longer -even under the extended warranty- and will cost about $80 dollars to replace. This contradicting what the original tech guy I talked to told me: that the battery would be replaced if defective.

As an aside, when I bought this computer, a friend of mine bought one nearly identical to it only with the 1.6 instead of 1.8ghs processor. His laptop was riddled with problems including a defective display and motherboard, and it took him months to get it set up, including I might add opening the laptop and fiddling with the cabling with the instruction of an on the phone tech guy. Is it just me or should the laptop come assembled properly? Oh, and the rebates took much longer than stated to arrive.

On the plus side, I did not have to wait for more than a few minutes to speak to one of their tech support guys. Thus far, that has been the only plus of owning this laptop, and really, ideally I would spend no time on the phone with them at all. I would heartily recommend you purchase a toshiba or HP laptop as I and everyone I know has had positive experiences with them, but given the propensity for Alienware machines to die shortly after their warranties expire and given the crappy coverage of the warranty to begin with (even when you spend a couple hundred bucks to extend it), I will not be buying an Alienware again, and I suggest you don't buy one to begin with.

Cheers,

-Steve