New Alienware 14, anything I should know re reliability/tweaks?

Hey everyone, have just bought an alienware 14 with 4700 cpu, gtx765 under windows 7.

After browsing the forums it would seem that there are some problems with the Alienware 14. I saw something about C1/USB faults and also issues with thermal throttling.

This is my third Alienware laptop, having got the m14xR1 and m17xR3 (GTX580m) already so I know enough to be wary of design faults/workarounds. I was going to upgrade the motherboard of my m14x r1 to the r2 to get the GT650m but then realised that I'd have to change the cpu too so I started to look for an r2 on the Outlet and managed to nab the Alienware 14 at a good price.

My new 14 should have the GTX765m, 16gb ram and Blu-ray so should be considerably better than my old m14x. I always felt the 1600x900 screen was a disappointment on the m14x so am looking fwd to the alienware 14's new screen!


I'm planning on picking up a 256mb Plextor msata drive to stick in it. Is this straight forward or do I need a specific BIOS or setup peculiar to the Alienware 14?

Ultimately the purpose of this post.... New Alienware 14, anything I should know, check or watch out for?

 

Granted I have only had mine a week, but I can say wow what a laptop! The build quality, performance and looks are all top notch. Im thoroughly impresed thus far, but the true test will be how it stands the test of time. All this coming from a business class snob thats used to thinkpads and precision laptops.

 

You're going to love the Alienware 14. It's better than the M14Xr1 in every way. Installing an mSata IS straight forward.

The only negatives I found are:

1) The fan would stay on most of the time. When I swapped out the HDD for an SSD, this was remedied; now, the fan hardly ever comes on unless you're driving the GT765m hard.

2) I found the Alienrespawn (Dell Backup & Recovery) program to be unreliable. I made a couple of backups with it fine but I could not restore that backup to a new drive. In fact, it screwed up my SSD, so that initially I couldn't even do a fresh install of Windows. I had to clean the SSD with DISKPART before I could proceed.

Best of luck with your new Alienware 14.

 

Thank you, nice to know its spec lives up to the hype. I believe Dell doesn't usually provide media for its installs, Do I download the windows/dell software and burn to a disk or copy from the Respawn software? I'd prefer a fresh install of windows on the msata drive over a system clone, what are the steps to do this?

 

Windows 7 or 8? If its 8 from my understanding the msata drives over the standard 64gb cache drive size will not be recognized by windows 8. Some users have reported getting them to work if you change the bios to ahci instead of raid. I can't speak from experience as I am running windows 7. Windows 7 there is no issues with the plextor msata 256gb drive and leaving the system in raid.

 

Windows 7 home premium (at least it should be, haven't had it delivered yet!)

RAID or AHCI? Whats going to give the best performance for the SSD, I thought AHCI was preferred for SSDs.

 

The system will come in raid mode even without the msata cache drive. I have tested both modes before I went raid ssd in my 14 and 18. There is a slight performance gain with the ssd even in raid mode running one drive over ahci. Ive yanked the optical drives out of both my 14 and 18 and am running raid 0 with two ssd's in my 14 and 3 ssd's in my 18. I did originally have the pleater msata drive in both my 14 and 18. They are very speedy little drives and was impressed with them. I personally prefer raid 0