Sunday 18 March 2012

Alienware M11xR2 Issues Part I

This post has nothing to do with Symbian or the Nokia N8.
But I believe, most people who care about CFW's, also have an interest on technology in general, so this may be something you want to read after all...

Its a long and depressing story about the Alienware/Dell Support and how they treat their customers.

Why did I choose the Alienware brand?
I like to start from the beginning, so why did I choose Alienware?

Four years ago I bought an Asus Notebook, the performance and stability of that system is out of question. But the built quality was not impressing at all. The screen became loose after a while and the material felt really cheap.
I had to send it into repair and it was gone for two month... a few years back I also sent in a Asus Motherboard for repair and got it back after four months (it even looked worse than before (they burned the molex plugs!), but it was working again), which is unacceptable!

So when I was ready to buy a new system, I decided to spend more money for better quality.

My favourites were Alienware or IBM Thinkpad.
I choose the Alienware, because the price seemed to be fair and they offered a 11" model, which was what I was looking for.

First impression
When I got my Alienware M11xR2, I was very impressed!
The case felt solid and stable, the performance was outstanding for a small Notebook and the unique style was exactly what I was looking for.

I was sure I made the right call, choosing the M11xR2!

When warranty ran out...
As it is with technical devices, they seem to break and cause troubles, shortly after the warranty ran out...
My Notebook was no exception. Three months after my one-year-warranty expired, I experienced major heating problems.

Running a CPU intensive application causes overheating after ~30-45 minutes... When the GPU kicks in (3d-Applications) the system shuts down in less than 15 minutes!!

I am now unable to use the full power of my Intel Core i5 & nvidia GPU... which feels like a downgrade to a cheap Netbook.

There was still hope...
I called the Alienware/Dell Service Centre and asked for help.
Surprisingly the friendly man on the service line, told me that they can help me fixing this, even if I am out of warranty!

As I understood him, this seems to be an engineering problem with the system and is still covered by their support.

He just needs me to email some details and proving my issue by screen shots, to open this case.

So I sent him all information's he needs to help me and waited for his reply.

*******

This story is not over yet, but I wrote a lot for a single post... this story will be continued in "Part II" soon...

4 comments:

  1. damn man, that sucks i thought Alienware was a good brand :S

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    Replies
    1. i though so too...
      but i don't want to say that the quality is bad, maybe i just had bad luck with my unit. until this heating problem came up, i was extremly happy with my notebook.

      the dissapointing part is the "solution", they offered me to fix my problem.

      (need some time to write it down in part II of this story)

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  2. i had similar problems with dell notebooks from 2003. in U.S. customers did win in front of a judge, outside U.S., people had to take care by themselves.

    I think and while reading all this stuff, many notebooks have probelms with overheating and power plugs (as mine).

    also my brand new mainboard from asus has a problem (just while doing reboot/boot), sometimes it needs to power up twice before it can boot properly. It's a known bug todays, but cant be handled in a customer friendly way.
    if i would send it to asus / replace it, it at least would take 8 weeks, most probably even longer... as i know where it may go to in China i even could hand it over to them by myself, as i stood several times in front of the asus manufacturing center in Suzhou.

    On the other hand, i was astonished, that Apple did replace my Ipod Nano 1. Generation FOC by end of 2011 due accu burning problems ((but in 2008/2009 just in U.S.) todays world wide)!!

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  3. this was a really good blog and i can tell you put a lot of work into it but you should try and putting things in there about the competing brands HTTP://tmanthetechman.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete