Well, where to begin? OK. I ordered my system (Athlon 800MHz Area 51) around July 10th of 2000. The person who took my order, Hector, was difficult to understand due to a heavy accent. He didn’t come across as an Alienware ‘counselor’ that wanted to help me build a great system. He seemed rushed and only partially interested.
But I place the order anyway. Heck, this company gets nothing but fantastic reviews!! The system arrived in about 47 days. During the waiting period, I would frequently try to check my order status on their website, but it had never progressed from the first phase of a four or five step process.

When it got to be close, I began calling to see what the status was, and got interesting reactions and half-truths. One day it was in quality checking, the next it was still in assembly. When I started to get angry, I started to get some more accurate responses, and lo-and-behold, my order was now being updated on the website.

My theory: My order was lost or not processed correctly and they built it at the last minute. They knew they screwed up, but lied to my face about it instead of admitting the mistake.

Well I finally received it and all was well in the world…

For about three weeks…

Things started to go wrong while I was surfing the net. My screen would go black for a few seconds and then return to normal. This ‘flickering’ increased in length and frequency as my uptime increased, until it got to the point where you needed to reboot.

Well, it was during one of these reboots that it went dead. System still had power, but no HDD activity, no POST, nothing. On the phone to tech support…

They were actually pretty quick to respond, and the tech had me do all the things I knew to do anyway. Reseat this, try it without that. Still dead. Tech thinks it’s a video card, and fires one out to me. Nope, that’s not it. Now they think it’s the mobo, and want to send a local vendor to my house to replace it. I told them to ship me the mobo and I would do it myself, and they did.

Still nothing! They want to do some more troubleshooting and I say enough, pack it up, and ship it to them to fix. I am being vague on the actual return times because honestly, I cannot remember, but it was well into September before I actually got it back and had the working system I had been charged for in July.

It worked great for the next 11 months. Then, one day when I tried to power it up, the problem returned. It now appears that my battle is lost. Alienware is sticking by their warranty guns, and because I am out of warranty, they can effectively do nothing for me. Out of five Emails to various people at the company, including the general tech support address, I received ONE response from Kevin, the Marketing and Business Development Manager. He has been the only contact at that company who has shown any genuine interest or effort on my behalf.

He forwarded my concerns to Roland, a manager of our customer service department. Well Roland promptly called me and asked a few generic tech support questions, then asked me to hold.
When he returned, he said it was probably the motherboard, and that they were aware of a bad batch of them around the time mine was replaced. Funny how I was never aware of this. He then proceeded to inform me that I was out of warranty and that all they could offer was technical support (whoopee), and I would have to purchase any parts needed. I rebutted, telling him that technically speaking, I didn’t receive a functional system until mid September, but it fell on very deaf ears. I asked him if he personally thought this was right, and he had the gall to say he thought a year was a good operating time for a PC!!

Well that about ended that conversation, and since then, they have hid behind the warranty shield with no desire to actually please this ex-customer. FWIW, I have good reason to believe that I didn’t even receive my system until August 22nd of 2k, but I lack physical evidence because I didn’t keep good records.

So here I sit, surfing the web for a good motherboard / CPU combo for my high performance gaming machine’… I think there are two morals to this story:
1. Don’t believe all the hype about Alienware.
2. Keep records of EVERYTHING!


Also, before anyone gets on a soapbox…

I know I could have built a comparable system for less. I didn’t want to. I have built systems before, and probably will many times again, but at that point in time, I wanted someone to do it for me. I’m not posting this for sympathy or advice, I’m posting it in hopes that I can save someone the anger and frustration that Alienware has put me through for the last year.


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