I hate love stories......

Sit back, relax and grab a popcorn because its going to take some time to tell you my love story that I now almost hate.............
It all started 2 years back when I saw first AW of my life and instantly fell in love with it. One of my clients from UK (I am from India) was carrying it and I just couldn't take my eyes off from the gorgeous body n lights. I started looking for more info about AW and finally stumbled right here with the u tech titans . Decided this was a machine worth having and started saving for it with my love for it growing every day. One thing here worth mentioning is that that my love for all things tech is only measured by my massive ignorance know how of all things tech :-D. So finally saved enough money to buy it and went to my nearest Dell store with my heart barely in my chest!
And thats when the hate part of this love story started. AW was introduced in India just about a year back (guesswork) and the Dell store told me that they don't keep AW readily available as there is very little demand for it and if I order it will take approx. 1 month for delivery (groan). So the only option was to order it online with 10 days delivery period. I called up Dell and the price for the model chosen (14 inch R2 with i7-3630 QM@ 2.40 Ghz, 6 GB DDR3 RAM, 750 GB HD@ 7200 RPM, Nvidia 650M 1GB and 1600X900 HD screen with 01 year warranty) was Rs 90,000 (USD 1750 approx.) The system's configuration on site showed it came with windows 7 but when I was placing my order they told me they are only shipping it with windows 8 (groan X 2). I literally pleaded them to give me windows 7 but they simply won't listen. I recently read somewhere that Microsoft has sold approx 100 million copies of windows 8 but its a fair guess how they sold the bulk of it . And on top of that the only item they were giving out with it apart from charger (it weights almost equal to my previous laptop lols) was a thin cloth sleeve. One of my cousins recently got an Inspiron 15" and he got a splendid backpack and a bluetooth mouse with it! They even refused to give out the windows software CD against all my requests.
Anyway, the system finally arrived within 7 days of order (must give due to Dell for fast shipping). I opened the case and I guess I don't have to tell you people the feeling that comes when u see the first AW of your life sitting right in front of you. All I did was updated RAM to 8 GB (Kingston 4 GB stick) and after that for 2 months it was the best love story of my life We both went along famously and I discovered the world of gaming which I never even knew existed! (thanks to you guys here again). The speakers are awesome and so is the screen. I made it my main workstation and shifted all my work to it without any kind of any backup (yup I know, I am a Genius).
Then one day about two months back, the battery stopped charging. It just wouldn't charge. So before calling out to tech support I just let the battery drain itself out and when it was fully drained I plugged it to charger again and it started working normally. Thought it was just a glitch off the charts and did not gave it much thought. Then a month back while I was watching a movie, suddenly the subwoofer went out (only Subwoofer, other speakers were working alright) and after one minute screen went blue and then all blackout...... I tried to switch it on but it just sat on the starting screen with the message that the windows was trying to repair a fault in hard drive and it will take approx 1 hour to rectify it. Fault in HARD DISK! Cold sweat broke out on my face. All my office files were stored on it (except for the files on which I was currently working of which I had a copy on my BB also). And such is my tech knowledge that I did not knew enough about cloud storage to have started using it. Anyway I gave it its 1 hour but still nothing. 2 hrs, 3 and then 4. Finally I took it to the Dell dealer who to my great joy told me that my hard disk is corrupted and he will have to send it back to Dell to have the hard disk replaced. I asked him what were the chances of recovering my data and he again to my delight and joy told me almost nil. Great, here I had a machine for which I saved money for almost 2 years and it blacked out on me in 4 months flat! He told me it will take approx 1 week to get the repair job done. I, in my great wisdom had already sold out my previous laptop which was a tiny winy Lenovo who never let me down even once in its 3 years of faithful service. So here I was, my lover affair gone sour just in 4 months and me left without any system for whole week. I finally managed to borrow one from my good friend for the time being.
I called out the Dell dealer after the due week to know if my system was ready. He told me that the HD was replaced and that if I would be kind enough to bring in recovery disks so that he can reinstall my OS. And again, in my great knowledge of all things tech I hadn't bothered to make any recovery disks. I told him that and he told me that in absence of recovery disks would I be kind enough to bring him my windows CD that came along with my system which to start with, Dell hadn't provided me. All in all, it came down to that my motherboard will have to be changed so that new OS can be installed which will take another 15 days. By this time I was beyond words so I told him just to do anything he seems fit and get my system back ASAP.
My beloved AW returned back to me after almost 1 month with all my data gone (approx 500 GB including everything). I asked Dell reasons for the HD failure but again not wanting to spoil their previous 100% record, they didn't gave any. But most of all I had to suffer in my work because I was left with practically no office data at all and on top of that my subwoofer IS still not working (it works just for 5-10 sec and then goes out). Also I noticed that while playing games (Farcry3 at low settings) it becomes very hot (especially around the power socket). So hot that its even difficult to touch that part (don't know to measure temps and thank you again, I know I am a genius). I have kept the air flow free from the fan by keeping the system on a stand all the time. And to top it out the screen sometimes turns blue for few seconds for no reason and I never knew that someday I will come to fear blue color so much.
Now I am reluctant to send it back to Dell as they might take another 15 to 20 days to rectify the problems. But above all I have lost all my faith in the system. I still very much love it and don't want to part with it but now I just don't know when again it will blow its top on me.
Its very sad that my love story has came down to this but suggestions from you guys especially regarding the heating part would be very welcome. Apart from that if there are any Indian guys here at the forum, I would very welcome any information about the returning procedure because returning the system back info they have provided in the pdf doc is for US and not for India (very convenient for us, isn't it). Any help from all you guys would be very appreciated because I don't want to end this relationship here and like this. And trust me guys when I say that I haven't worked this hard to keep a relationship alive all my life !!

 

I read through all your post and I do have to apologize for the inconveniences that you have had with the machine, it seems to me that the issue has gone farther than expected. I wish I could do something else from my side to help you out but we are only able to manage cases from the US and CA. The reason why the could not tell you what caused the HDD failure is because many things could cause it, from simple mechanic (the HDD rotates, therefore it might have just stopped rotating) to SW corruption. HDD's are the most common failure on all machines, not only Alienware. About the SubWoofer issue, I believe that it could have been told on the 1st service so that only one thing had to be swapped. The battery not charging could have been fixed with the BIOS update and if that did not work replacing the motherboard would be the next step.
Hopefully you will get everything sorted out soon and you will be back on your love story with your Alienware.

 

wish someone from indian dell services could reply like you Porras. have talked to dell techenical support and it seems that they might send an engineer next week. keeping my fingers crossed for that. meanwhile if you could give any suggestions reagrding high temps i would be most thankful

 

Most of our tips for this type of issues can be found on this article.

 

How did it go? Did the dust off suggested in the article help lower the temps?

 

no Prado... Though the system in not more then four months old and it had been in to dell sevice centre for changing HD and motherboard ( which i guss will get the it cleaned by service staff) just a month back but still i did as it was instructed in article. Bot no encouraging results whatsoever. However I Have a dell support person coming in a day or two. Will update on the further happenings then.

 

hope this may help. these are the temps after playing far cry for 15 minutes on low settings:

 

my gpu also sometimes max at 68 and i did not see a problem when playing any game for a long time.

 

Hello my friend.

I would totally recommend turning off turbo boost mode for CPU. This is achieved in the BIOS menu (when you start your machine, press F2 to enter there). Check again your temps and I am olmost sure you will have about 10°C less with turbo boost off. Also you can use a cooler pad for another 1~2 °C less in CPU temps.

Also in BIOS, check that OVERCLOCK options are turned off.

 

if i turn off turbo boost, will it effect the performance in gaming ? i also use photoshop and doing some programming stuff.

 

so the dell engineer came in yesterday evening. Changed my subwoofer and heatsink. The subwoofer is now working properly but the overall sound level (low to high) is definitely quite lower than earlier woofer. There also seems to be some improvement in temps now. Below temps were taken after playing far cry for 2 hrs. adrino I have the same question as abec... Won't turning off the turbo boost affect game quality????

 

Those temps seem quite right. To turn up the volume level (I.E. when I play local multiplayer games at the office) I use the Sound Blaster panel control and enter THX Trustudio Pro, then activate "smart volume".

I am not quite sure if turning off turbo boost would affect photoshop, but you won't have any problem with gaming. The I7 processor by itself is capable of managing games without "overclocking" itself. By turning TB off, you will get the same performance (you can compare frame rates using FRAPS for example) with a lot cooler temps.

 

Tried the Sound blaster panel but no particular effect. It seems that the subwoofer is holding back ;-) (very quite kind of beat) if u know what i mean... Also after changing heatsink the temps seem to be holding on for good so I think I will keep the things as they are as of now. However if the temps again go up, I definitely will work on our advice

 

My troubles don't seem to be ending in the near future. OS blacked out on me yesterday. Had to reinstall everything don't know how to cope up with this machine. And Dell has refused to change this machine or refund my amount every time I turn on this lap, I don't know what else will blow up. Never thought will have this kind of experience with it

 

Could be a driver / OS issue. I feel for you buddy and I hope everything works out for you in the end :thumbsup:.

 

I agree, have you tried re-installing the OS?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...er-install-order-guide-alienware-systems.html

 

yup.......seems to be holding on its own as of now. really love this machine and sincerely hoping for a long term relationship thank u guys. U really are awsme !!!

 

Sorry to be back with my woes again... Recently have been getting a lot of blue screen errors. Yesterday PC checkup came up with this error... Can anyone please tell me what it is or how to rectify it???