My 18 experience was, hmm...a disaster.

Alright, so to keep things short, my experience with the 18 has been as follows:

-Terrible.

Well, not terrible. But almost completely unbearably bad. The reason? Well, let's wrap this up so you don't have to read through rants but facts instead.

Bought machine and received at the start of July. Happy with machine.

Has high peaking component temperatures but otherwises works fine for 5 days. Happy until it stops working.

In transit at Hong Kong from Honolulu to Shanghai when it stops working. Machine gives me black screen on start up. Me not happy any more.

Arrive in Shanghai at 3am due to China air traffic. Sleep minimally and bring into AW shop a few hours later to diagnose after trying endless combinations of pulling out batteries and holding down this and that.

They diagnose faulty motherboard. Tell me replacement will cost 6000-8000 CNY (roughly = 1000-1300 USD) because my warranty is based in the USA. Me very unhappy after hearing this. How can transfer warranty during transit flight?

Many days of arguing and worrying. One week and a few days passes. A friend in the USA goes out of his way to help me because he has dealt with this before. Tells me I can transfer warranty effective locale from USA to China. We do it, it transfers.

Go back to AW shop. AW staff tells me I cannot transfer warranty after machine has problems. I try to explain it already has been and I don't need it to be. They reluctantly accept this but what they say has angered me more.

They tell me to go to another shop, a Dell Service Centre, to have the mobo replaced. I go to shop. Wait 2 hours to be serviced. They tell me it will take 5-10 days to repair. They tell me they will call me when it is done.

5 days pass. I call to ask 18's status. They say, 'not done yet'.

10 days pass. Ditto.

15 days pass. Agitated now. Same situation as the previous 2.

20 days pass. Call again. Apparently was fixed but they did not call me. I rush to the store to get it.

Receive it and check for any errors. Everything is functional but notice SLI in NVIDIA control panel is missing! Attempt uninstallation and reinstallation of NVIDIA graphics drivers. No dice. Dell Service Centre employee recommends I do a fresh installation of my OS (windows 7) to mitigate issue, based on his 'past work experience'.

I wipe everything and attempt OS reinstallation. Wipe is successful but booting from disk causes error when selecting drive to install 7 to. Angry, cannot solve issue.

Bring laptop to AW shop again. They say they can install it no problem. They apparently install 7 (using ghost32) and all necessary drivers but unknown to me they ****ed it up completely. This does not solve SLI issue but I am not surprised.

I go home and realise they install windows 7 in Chinese with English language pack. Unacceptable because all software setups and certain things are still in Chinese. I also get numerous errors with lighting and the mSATA SSD drive. Eventually I learn they attempted to install the 17's drivers onto the machine. Furious.

I return to shop and explain their idiocy to them. They attempt to defend themselves by explaining that 17 is all they have, it's either that or nothing. I explain as calmly as possible that I can download the 18's drivers from the dell website myself. They also tell me they have no existing copies of an english windows 7 to install for me. They recommend going to Dell Service Centre. This time I call before I go, asking to check if they have one. As expected, they did not in fact have an english 7 either, and further asked to charge 400 CNY (circa 80 USD) to reinstall windows. They also say they cannot address the fact that SLI was WORKING before the mobo died, and that it is NOT working now, and that in effect, THEY caused this particular issue. I ask them to sod off and attempt to try again at home.

Stroke of luck. I install my own English 7 via their chinese 7. Works well. Gather my mental strength to deal with SLI issue.
I make dozens of calls to break through the haze of terrible customer service. Eventually I am forwarded to a man in Fujian who takes my plight seriously. Long story short after the call, a dell technician comes to my house to fix the issue. Even when I got the machine I suspected it was something to do with the physical SLI cable. I expected bad cable. I did not expect to find what the technician found in the machine.

He opens it up in front of me. He is puzzled because many of the screws are missing from the machine. Not enough to not be able to use it, but 3 screws are now holding down the optical drive instead of 3, if you know what I mean. Then he takes off the keyboard.

There is no SLI bridge. The s at the service centre did not put my bridge back in!

He is as shocked as I am but not as angry. Luckily the man in Fujian had understood my ordeal and the technician already had with him an SLI bridge and two 780Ms (in case my cards were defective). He fixes it and, unsurprisingly, SLI works again for me. Yay.

I want to burn down the Dell Service Centre but I cannot be bothered to deal with those people agin.

At that point, it is the start of August; I had owned the machine for a month and had used it for 5 days. Very unsatisfied with the product but even more with the service.

It is now past mid-August. Extended use with the machine has allowed me to notice smaller but significant defects with the machine. The machine has:

Significant backlight bleeding. The entire left-bottom is a soft snowstorm and there's a nasty bit on the upper-right.
Display hinge issue. When I close the lid, the display does not actually line up with the rest of the machine, and it is actually very slightly tilted to the right.
Small scratch on the lid surface. This would actually not be a problem, but the fact is that I take extremely good care of my laptops, and as owners of the 18 may know, it is very heavy, so I leave it on my desk most of the time. This only means the Dell Service Centre is responsible for this scratch. The scratch itself I knew would come with wear and tear but this kind of service makes me so furious and exasperated.

I am currently debating whether to simply replace this unit after two years and go for something like the ASUS G750. My previous laptop was an ASUS N43 that worked right out of the boxed and is still working to today, after 3 years. My 18 was broken out of the box, but I truly hope it will not keep breaking down over the next few years.

Overall I had high hopes and not even high but mediocre expectations from Alienware. I was waiting to be impressed but instead was stressed and, I feel, cheated out of much of my time and money. This is not the machine I have paid 3000+ USD for. This is an insult. The service I recieved is not the service included in the 3000+ I paid for.

All I can say is while the machine does what it is meant to do quite well, which is run games, it fails at almost every other aspect. I recommend those who do want to purchase the 18 to not, and instead go with a 17 inch ASUS or the Aorus or even the Razor Blade or Falcon Northwest.

 

That alone set all my alarms off. Dell's warranty covers you in any eligible country for travel durations less than 90 days. Either the people you first approached were ignorant about the policy or they were trying their luck at making a quick buck out of you. For the record, when encountering issues while traveling, your first point of contact should be one of the three phone lines: 1. call center of the foreign country, 2. call center of your home country, or 3. International Queue at 512-728-7424 (toll call), if in the US or Canada, call 800-285-1653 (toll free). These centralized hotlines are more likely to treat you professionally than some sub-contracted repair center whose authenticity simply cannot be verified in some countries.

Having said that I agree that Dell's customer service can be confusing to navigate for new customers. However after some experience working with them I am now fairly confident of receiving the service that I am eligible for and I will not hesitate to buy from Dell if I find a product attractive.

Edit: source for the international warranty information http://www.dell.com/content/topics/...dellcare/international_travel?c=us&l=en&cs=04

 

Almost all of the bad things I've read about Alienware happen outside of the U.S. It's a shame, but not unexpected. The standards are extremely low elsewhere.

You should have left the laptop in your friends name and just sent it to him in the U.S. to have it repaired. Then have him send it back.

 

There is a HUGE chance that he would have had a ridiculous shipping charge to send it AND a huge customs charge to collect it when it came back. Believe me when I say, shipping things from outside the US and receiving things while outside of the US is a massive pain.

I've bought a game for $20 local currency before, paid $100 for shipping (which was a great deal) off ebay, then had to pay $150 to collect my own item or they'd send it back. I might as well have bought it straight in my country if I found it on a good sale at that point. Far less if I actually purchased anything expensive; they're like vultures here, and my country doesn't NEARLY have it the worst.

 

Yikes, this entire thread makes me sad. Consumers shouldn't be treated like this, what a shame.

 

Oh yeah. OP, I don't think ASUS laptops are doing all that well right now. I'm glad your previous one is working great and everything, but when the time comes that you decide it's time to get a new one, do a fresh check for about a month of the currently-existing manufacturers. Trust me, companies can change in the space of a few days.

 

Yeah, shipping would be high, but cheaper than spending $1300 on a motherboard he doesn't need, lol.

What's this shop he's referring to? Never heard of an Alienware shop. Do they have these in other countries? I just pick up the phone and get my PC fixed.

 

Well, it depends on the country. For example if I were to have an assemble-able chair shipped down here I might have to pay $5000 to clear it, even if the chair itself only costed like $60 USD (~$400 to me). Countries and customs policies suck.

Never heard of an alienware shop.

 

Thanks for all the replies.

The import tax would have been devastating. The machines are made in China and I believed are reimported to China after being shipped to the States. If any of you fellows live in the UK, the price of purchase is roughly the same as here in China, which is why I bought mine whilst in the USA. Do not quote me on this, but I have a firm reason to believe after talking to endless expatriates here that certain electronics in China have a significant (20-25%) percentage that can be taxed on import. This means I would have not only had to pay 200 USD for the shipping fee out, but 200 USD for the shipping fee in and either 750 USD/4500 CNY or 1400 USD/8700 CNY, depending on if they assume the Chinese prices or the American prices. This I am actually not sure about, how they check, how they charge, because I have never been eager to pay a 20% import tax on anything. I do believe the way they charge is if it is above a certain market price...need to find out more about this in China. Which is easier said than done.

One of the reasons I have so much trouble with the customer service (if you can call it that) here is that all the employees only speak Chinese, and whilst my Chinese is not disastrous, it is certainly is not near the bar I need to be able to communicate forcefully and aggressively with these people.

https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Al...2!3m1!1s0x35b27a9883081935:0xb8c1c04ac7c067e3

I just read that and indeed it is confusing, because China is technically my home country, and calling internationally is extremely expensive because I do not have the adequate phone plan to do so (17 years of age, and parents do not want me willy-nilly calling globally, for some reason). I am not sure if I have this "Next Business Day On-site Response Service" either. The machine I bought was Dell certified refurbished so I did not get to pick some of the more picky bits.

Trust me if I say I would have taken it somewhere else instead of that particular Dell Service Centre, but it is the only place in Shanghai that 'officially services dell machines'.

At this point it's looking like I may just want to build myself a mITX in the future and try to design a very large bag.

That being said, now that everything is okay, I can live with most things, but since I've noticed it the backlight bleed on the left is extremely annoying when playing certain games such as Fallout 3 or Skyrim with darker nights enabled, or even when watching a simple movie. Is there anything I can do to mitigate this? I have seen others on the forums apparently take out the metal braces on the sides of the LCD, but I am not so ready to take apart the machine right after it's been fixed.

 

I'd say talk with dell either here or US and get it replaced, you paid good money for the machine and deserve a rig that works and looks the part, it may take some more wrangling on your part, but if there is one thing I have learnt by having to deal with dell Australia is that Lady Luck shines on you when you are persistent which could mean a month