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2 out of 2 people found this review helpful
0.5 stars
"The worst computer company in the world"
Pros: Decent computer when it works, which isn't often
Cons: Frequent Failures, Extremely Hot, Terrible Customer Service
Summary: I bought and Alienware 7700 for over $4,000 at the end of April 2005. I had 4 months of worry -free use, and thought that I had finally hit the jackpot as far as great computer systems go.
Thats when the probems started. One day, the system refused to boot, and I spent several hours on the phone with tech support. After hours of useless help, the guy gave up and actually emailed me a link to a help page on the internet. I googled the problem myself, and the link he emailed me was the first hit of the results page! I ended up restoring the system to factory condition, loosing everything on the HDDs.
A month later, the exact same problem occured. After having an even worse experience with tech support without them helping me at all, I restored the laptop back to the factory configuration again. This was the second catasrophic failure I experienced.
Then in January 06, the system wouldn't power up at all one day. Tech support had me remove and replace the RAM, Processor Heat Sink, Keyboard, Wireless card, HDDs, and optical drives several times. This took about 6 hours overall, and was rather tedious work. I work with computers for a living so I was able to take everything apart and put it back together, but I couldn't imagine the average computer user having to do all of this. Even though I COULD do it, I paid a TON of money for the best warrenty that Alienware offered, but this is apparently the way they do things... Anyway, after a 6 hour stint with tech support, they finally asked me to send it in to there in house support center. Since my work relied on this computer, I worked out a deal where I would pay to send the computer overnight and they in turn would return it via overnight. They also quoted me a 10 day turn-around time.
Well, after a full day of talking to Alienware and sending my computer to them via overnight for over $150, the repair ended up taking 21 days, and then as icing on the cake, they shipped it back to me via FedEx ground. My system was gone for over a month, and I lost out on a bunch of consulting work.
The system came back to me with a different motherboard than the one it was manufactured with. I thought that they might of fixed a bug or something, so this might have been good, right? Not the case. Come March of 06, the computer refuses to boot with a motherboard PCI error. Once again, tech support has me disassemble and reassemble my laptop, and then says I have to send it back to thier in-house repair facility.
This being the 4th failure in less than a year, I am pretty angry. I ended up talking to 7 different people, and after an entire afternoon spent on the phone, they offer me A $50 DOLLAR GIFT CERTIFICATE! THATS IT!
Alienware REFUSES to stand behind the hardware they sell. Thier goal is to get your money, and once that happens, they could care less about what happens to their systems. I spent OVER $4,000 one year ago for the best system money could buy. I ended up getting an easy-bake oven than fails every 3 months on average. I am now exploring class-action lawsuit options and protection under Florida's lemon laws...
