Help with Video drivers/AW Customer Service

Hello, I've had some problems with my m14x and I was hoping I could get some advice, insight on what to do next. This might be kinda long so I'm sorry about that.

I got my M14x back in January and out of the box things weren't right. Games were playing terribly, the drivers that Alienware recommends on the Dell website weren't even being able to install. Many calls to customer service later I ended up having to re install windows and found a driver that would work. Everything was fine then one day it decided that it would immediately shutdown when not plugged in, even on full battery.. I asked for a replacement and got one with no problems, and immediately installed a driver recommended on here. I believe it was the 295.73.

Now, this one was working well, then I began to notice some lag spurts in game and things like that I don't believe I should have been having. Also, the right side of my keyboard lights were not working.. So After putting it off for a while I decided to call AW customer support, because after being a customer for almost 3 years I've had nothing but good experiences with these guys. Until tonight.

I mentioned the random lags in game, and the representative told me that it was due to the driver installed not being recommended by them. I said okay, well can you install the correct ones? (remember those drivers were not able to be installed on my computer) He told me very rudely that I was violating the warranty by having installed the different drivers and said it would cost around 90 - 120 dollars for him to download the correct ones.... After refusing this service he says he'll fix it for free, but had no problem acting like an in doing so. When he realized that the recommended drivers would not install he blamed it on me saying that it was because of the previous installed drivers. I calmly tried to explain to him that it had done that before, and that's when he told me to stop lying to him and be honest.

So taking that in, I asked for a manager. Their shift was just about over so he told me his manager agreed with him and said that they are going to charge me if I would like that service. End of call.

So for obvious reasons I'm very frustrated that this guy was a complete to me when I tried to be calm and explain to him what happened, and then he calls me a liar.

Anyways, I'm sorry for the long post, but I'm hoping that some of you guys could give me any suggestions to dealing with this problem, or any advice on drivers to install. Thanks for reading my book.

 

I do not believe that the warranty covers driver installations - the warranty would be hardware related. Dell only recommend drives after they have performed testing I imagine.

Just a suggestion - do backups etc (all the usuals )

If you are having trouble with their drivers then maybe a restore to the initial windows installation and attempt to install their "Recommended" drivers and if it fails again then give them a call to get them to explain what the issue is.


Which GPU is it that you are having an issue with?

 

Well heres what you can do. Restore to factory settings using alien respawn. ( if you have d:, your data wont be deleted. just c: will be formatted )

then install just basic stuff and the game that is giving you problem. And the moment you get a problem, call them and just tell them about the problem you are facing. Dont tell them anything about what other driver you updated and stuff. Reason being that dell rep you were talking to probably knew nothing about m14x or how to try fix it. Its first time i have heard that updating driver voids warranty and stuff. He is no position to charge money for driver issues.

So just call them after factory setting and then state your problem. Atleast this wont let them provide you with biased info and will help you better

 

When it comes to software issues your prob better off asking around here than alienware support. Only reason I call them these days is if I need a hardware replacement. Just my personal experience.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S2 using tapatalk 2

 

My gpu I'm having issues with is the 555m 1.5gb.. I believe it's 1.5gb.

Thanks for your suggestions guys I'll definitely keep them in mind! Yeah I mainly called them for the issue with my alien fx lights, but when I mentioned the small problem I was having that's when he kinda went off on me.

 

So I've tried using the 296.10 driver and it didn't really do anything. Battlefield 3 is where I'm seeing most of the issues, and starcraft when I have the graphics turned up at all. Bf3 just stutters a lot and doesn't play well at all. Even when I turn the settings down completely it still lags for some reason. I have the settings in the Nvidia control panel all set to performance and things like that. I've also tried installing the drivers dell has on their site and NONE of them will even install. It says it cannot detect compatible graphics hardware. But the 296.10 drivers install fine..

Anyone know anything about exchanging laptops with Alienware? I got this replacement about two months ago, and I haven't had problems with it because I used it basically as a backup to my desktop so I never tried to play games on it too much until recently.

 

have you tried whitelisting? If not use the guide in my sig.

 

May be worth running scans to make sure the HD is performing ok - as per the above its worth checking to see that the games are using the GT555 GPU over the Intel one. I had to do this for the D3 beta and it worked a treat.

 

I have not performed any scans for the HD I'll go ahead and try that next. I have whitelisted, I have also tried the drivers 296.10, and 295.73 was suggested as being more stable, but for me I received the same performance.

 

I've run some benchmarks on my hdd and my graphics card. Both show up pretty normal. I tried overclocking my graphics card and it showed pretty much no improvement in battlefield 3. Tested out a few other games that are somewhat graphically intensive work okay, in sc2 I can't really crank up the graphics at all or i get random lag. It seems like the main problems are in BF3, and this bothers me because it was the same problems I had with the original laptop before it was replaced with this one.

I've spoken to Dell reps and they're having someone come out and replace my graphics card. After that they said if they is no real improvement then they'll talk to me about the possibilities of an exchange or something. I pretty much just want an exchange because I feel that maybe the new graphics card will improve my problems, and like I said I've been having them since day 1 on 2 different machines. It seems like other people can run bf3 and everything just fine and I run into problems with them.