Technology Alienware

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Katatonic

Katatonic

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Yeah. I went there.

So I'm in the market for a new laptop (because I can't take my desktop to the Army for training, and I need something to do my homework on). So the big contenders right now are:

Macbook Pro 13"

Alienware M11X

**Any other recommendation of small, portable laptops**

I'm leaning towards a PC a) because I love Windows 7, and b) price. For the money I'd spend on a Macbook Pro, I could get my new PC laptop with a portable printer/scanner. I also like the M11X because of it's size but it's capability to switch between GPU's to save battery, as well as aesthetics (I know, I'm a trendy b***). Anyone have an experience with "ultraportable" laptops?
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Alienware is so incredibly overpriced.

Go for XoticPC, they make solid stuff at a good price.
 
Thanks 1UP, I've been perusing XoticPC briefly and the same thing keeps popping up. For the amount of power packed into that 11" alienware laptop, the specs are just better than many of the (obviously lower priced) models Asus offers through that site. In that case, I wouldn't put the new M11X in the "overpriced" range, because it's actually one of the few new laptops to put that much power in a laptop that portable (even though 4.4lbs is at the upper limit of what most would consider the ultra-portable category).
 
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I should also point out though (I didn't notice this at first) that the M11X lack a disc drive. This isn't a big deal in terms of software/game downloading because I do all of that online basically, but it seems like it'd be a hindrance at some point. Considering an external disc drive can run you $50-80 it seems like it may be too large a compromise.
 
I bought 2 Alienwares, nothing but horrible experiences with both, deplorable customer service and both laptops had overheating problems. I'll never buy from them again.
 
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Literally anything with >=4GB RAM and an i5 or better (2nd generation Core preferable) will do you fine. Do you play games a lot (i.e. are you sure you want a discrete GPU?)
 
Well after reviving my 5 year old iBook G4 and deleting a bunch of garbage, it runs at an okay pace. Given that it'll really only be for Word and Powerpoint while I'm in training for ~9 months, I'll save myself the money of a new laptop and put it toward a new scanner/printer.

Thanks for the opinions! And sorry about your poor experience with alienware/Dell products and customer service, that sucks.
 
Katatonic said:
Well after reviving my 5 year old iBook G4 and deleting a bunch of garbage, it runs at an okay pace. Given that it'll really only be for Word and Powerpoint while I'm in training for ~9 months, I'll save myself the money of a new laptop and put it toward a new scanner/printer.

Thanks for the opinions! And sorry about your poor experience with alienware/Dell products and customer service, that sucks.
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G4? Whoa...what's the latest version of OSX that will run on a PPC, 10.5?
 
movax said:
G4? Whoa...what's the latest version of OSX that will run on a PPC, 10.5?
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Haha 10.4 I'm not sure what animal it is...Tiger I believe, it was 2 versions before Snow Leopard came out.
 
In other good news, I afford to put some new awesomeness in my desktop PC since I won't be buying a new laptop.
 
Katatonic said:
In other good news, I afford to put some new awesomeness in my desktop PC since I won't be buying a new laptop.
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i5-2500K is cost-effective. No reason to go for less than 8GB of RAM with prices the way they are on Newegg at the moment.
 
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I've got an XPS and the thing is pretty much a lemon. All the parts have been replaced often more than once, and while the service is okay, they have several times replaced bad parts with other bad parts! My XPS has been dead for about two weeks now and even after a factory return had multiple dysfunctions and completely failed again. If you buy from dell be sure to get the best, longest warranty. You WILL need it.

As for overheating problems btw, their fix was a BIOS update that runs the fans as loud as possible all the time. Awesome. And if a fan fails there is no sensor and no direct test for it. Ridiculous.
 
Neuronix said:
I've got an XPS and the thing is pretty much a lemon. All the parts have been replaced often more than once, and while the service is okay, they have several times replaced bad parts with other bad parts! My XPS has been dead for about two weeks now and even after a factory return had multiple dysfunctions and completely failed again. If you buy from dell be sure to get the best, longest warranty. You WILL need it.

As for overheating problems btw, their fix was a BIOS update that runs the fans as loud as possible all the time. Awesome. And if a fan fails there is no sensor and no direct test for it. Ridiculous.
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Listen to teh Corgi, teh Corgi is wise.
 
1UP said:
Listen to teh Corgi, teh Corgi is wise.
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My alter ego does much research, I say.
 
If you do a search, you'll find disparity in the "usual" disgruntled laptop owners who deal with Alienware. Entire websites have been devoted to the horrible customer service, the crappy machines that keep breaking, and apparently no interest in improving themselves. There was a huge influx of letters to Endgadget.com about the m15x and m17x faults where the hinges kept breaking and it gained enough attention that Alienware issued an official response to Endgadget to help put out fires as a PR move. They're awesome until you get your machine and change your mind, then they get nasty if your unsatisfied in any way. My m15x "looked" beautiful when I first got it, but I had hinge issues, overheating issues, you name it. It was a complete POS, just like it's predecessor and incredibly overpriced. After owning a Macbook Pro, I can't fathom going back to something with such a horrible build quality. Yes, I paid a premium for the MBP, but at least it shows...

On my first laptop from Alienware that turned into a lemon, I sent it back for a refund and it took 2 months to receive it. After 2 years I decided that they surely must have changed by then, had an almost identical experience with my m15x. I owned that computer for a few months and couldn't take it anymore, sold it on ebay.
 
Groove said:
If you do a search, you'll find disparity in the "usual" disgruntled laptop owners who deal with Alienware. Entire websites have been devoted to the horrible customer service, the crappy machines that keep breaking, and apparently no interest in improving themselves. There was a huge influx of letters to Endgadget.com about the m15x and m17x faults where the hinges kept breaking and it gained enough attention that Alienware issued an official response to Endgadget to help put out fires as a PR move. They're awesome until you get your machine and change your mind, then they get nasty if your unsatisfied in any way. My m15x "looked" beautiful when I first got it, but I had hinge issues, overheating issues, you name it. It was a complete POS, just like it's predecessor and incredibly overpriced. After owning a Macbook Pro, I can't fathom going back to something with such a horrible build quality. Yes, I paid a premium for the MBP, but at least it shows...

On my first laptop from Alienware that turned into a lemon, I sent it back for a refund and it took 2 months to receive it. After 2 years I decided that they surely must have changed by then, had an almost identical experience with my m15x. I owned that computer for a few months and couldn't take it anymore, sold it on ebay.
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So wait is this before or after dell bought them.

As far as dell goes, just don't buy their cheapest model and treat it with just a little bit of respect and you'll be fine. I literally watched people put their laptop down in the dirt outside and watch a movie and then complain later and blame dell when it breaks. <-- this is like 98% of all disgruntled dell owners.

Then they go out and drop a 2 grand on a MBP and treat it like a second child (not watching movies in the dirt) and say how awesome it is. It's all so interesting.

An overwhelming amount of the time the problem is the user, not the hardware.

I find it funny you bring up hinges...apple has a perfect track record regarding hinges...right.

Just buy what what you want and treat it well and an overwhelmingly amount of the time its going to last.

A normal consumer laptop is designed to be replaced every 1-3 years, this jumps to around 3-5 for business products.
 
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Neuronix said:
I've got an XPS and the thing is pretty much a lemon. All the parts have been replaced often more than once, and while the service is okay, they have several times replaced bad parts with other bad parts! My XPS has been dead for about two weeks now and even after a factory return had multiple dysfunctions and completely failed again. If you buy from dell be sure to get the best, longest warranty. You WILL need it.

As for overheating problems btw, their fix was a BIOS update that runs the fans as loud as possible all the time. Awesome. And if a fan fails there is no sensor and no direct test for it. Ridiculous.
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I'm curious which parts have failed repeatedly? I'm pretty sure there is a lemon law that covers computers, have you looked into it?
 
justaregularmed said:
An overwhelming amount of the time the problem is the user, not the hardware.
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http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/12/alienware-area-51-m15x-owners-outraged-by-overheating-cracking/

http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/10/some-alienware-m15x-users-still-reporting-problems-after-bios-up/

Read for yourself. In general, I had a great experience with my Dell computers. Sure, something breaks at some point but customer service and repairs were great. Dell owns Alienware, but Alienware is not Dell. It almost functions as a separate entity and Dell used them to cater to their niche gamer and multimedia enthusiast market while they chased after bigger fish.. the corporate market. Dell had bought Alienware by the time they released the m15x. My customer service still went through Alienware, not Dell. Things may have changed by then, but I doubt it.

As for Apple... c'mon dude. The MBP is machined out of a single piece of aluminum. The Dell or Alienware machine is made out of disparate parts of plastic. I'd say Apple is going to win on aesthetics and structural integrity just about every time. I may not can mod the hell out of it like I did my old Inspiron 9300 but I certainly had less hardware failure and the resell value was much greater. I now use an iMac, dual booted with Windows 7.
 
Groove said:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/12/alienware-area-51-m15x-owners-outraged-by-overheating-cracking/

http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/10/some-alienware-m15x-users-still-reporting-problems-after-bios-up/

Read for yourself. In general, I had a great experience with my Dell computers. Sure, something breaks at some point but customer service and repairs were great. Dell owns Alienware, but Alienware is not Dell. It almost functions as a separate entity and Dell used them to cater to their niche gamer and multimedia enthusiast market while they chased after bigger fish.. the corporate market. Dell had bought Alienware by the time they released the m15x. My customer service still went through Alienware, not Dell. Things may have changed by then, but I doubt it.

As for Apple... c'mon dude. The MBP is machined out of a single piece of aluminum. The Dell or Alienware machine is made out of disparate parts of plastic. I'd say Apple is going to win on aesthetics and structural integrity just about every time. I may not can mod the hell out of it like I did my old Inspiron 9300 but I certainly had less hardware failure and the resell value was much greater. I now use an iMac, dual booted with Windows 7.
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I just thought it was comical you pointed out hinges as a problem with alienware. Apple has quite the sordid history with their hinges going back to g3 power books.

Just saying I ran a not top of the line dell laptop for nearly 3 1/2 years without turning it off, in no realm is the laptop designed to be used that way and it continues to run fine to this day (although I don't use it much). Its only 7 years old now.
 
justaregularmed said:
Just saying I ran a not top of the line dell laptop for nearly 3 1/2 years without turning it off, in no realm is the laptop designed to be used that way and it continues to run fine to this day (although I don't use it much). Its only 7 years old now.
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I used to manage an IT dept in my previous career for 6 years and Dell was our main supplier. I know quite a bit about Dell's. We had a steady stream of laptops/desktops needing repair and knew the Dell techs by first name because we saw them so frequently fixing our exec's laptops. I should have hired you to learn your secrets...would have saved us lots of money and loss of productivity. That's a normal corporate environment though, and not Dell's fault. These things aren't made to last forever. Your experience is very out of the norm. Was that a DTR laptop (desktop replacement) or did you actually carry that portable computer out of the house? If so... you turned it off. If not....why on earth did you buy a portable computer?
 
Groove said:
I used to manage an IT dept in my previous career for 6 years and Dell was our main supplier. I know quite a bit about Dell's. We had a steady stream of laptops/desktops needing repair and knew the Dell techs by first name because we saw them so frequently fixing our exec's laptops. I should have hired you to learn your secrets...would have saved us lots of money and loss of productivity. That's a normal corporate environment though, and not Dell's fault. These things aren't made to last forever. Your experience is very out of the norm. Was that a DTR laptop (desktop replacement) or did you actually carry that portable computer out of the house? If so... you turned it off. If not....why on earth did you buy a portable computer?
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Yeah my old desktop has a few hard drives with 4-5 years of power on time and they still run like a champ, although one started to make some less then ideal noises so I stopped running it.

I'm curious as to what was common to break? Stuff with moving parts? Or did you actually have some rare component failures? I have a very small sample size and nearly all the time the problem is user error. I would expect a lot of, oops I dropped my laptop when it was running. You mean I shouldn't use my laptop on the beach or by the pool or outside when the humidity is 80%. I would expect the other complaints to be porn related viruses and the like.

It's just a 14 inch inspiron. I'm most concerned about the HDD because its power on time is over 3 years and hitachi only reccomended 333 hours a month or about 2.2 power on years, guess I'm just lucky. Hinge is a little floppy fan still works (although I think its only rated for 30,000 hours so its getting along there, I would have replaced it but its an unbelievable pain in the ass, well you would probably believe it). I dunno what to tell you I just take really good care of my stuff.
 
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justaregularmed said:
I'm curious as to what was common to break? Stuff with moving parts? Or did you actually have some rare component failures?

It's just a 14 inch inspiron. Hinge is a little floppy fan still works (although I think its only rated for 30,000 hours so its getting along there, I would have replaced it but its an unbelievable pain in the ass, well you would probably believe it). I dunno what to tell you I just take really good care of my stuff.
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Well, the whole thing is a moving part if you think about it. I've seen just about every component you can think of go bad at some point, but hey... that's just about any computer. HDD's are probably most prone to failure. If your laptop hasn't been opened or your fans cleaned in 3 years, I shudder to think what it looks like in there and the innards of your Inspiron could use a little spring cleaning. You've gotten lucky with your HDD and are living on borrowed time so I'd back up your critical data. Sending a crashed HDD off to a lab to recover data that wasn't backed up is a pain in the ass and surprisingly expensive. (About 2 grand from what I remember and that was years ago when the CFO of our company lost some critical data in a crash...)

However, I still don't understand you saying that you ran your laptop for 3+ years without turning it off. No software driver updates? No hardware driver updates? No OS updates? All these things require a reboot. When you reboot and your BIOS goes through POST, you're technically turning off your HD, motherboard, components, etc.. and they are being "re-started" and re-initialized. I've never even heard of a desktop user's computer going that long without a re-start, even with a linux environment. If you truly haven't turned off or re-started your computer in 3+ years, you need to contact Guinness.
 
justaregularmed said:
I'm curious which parts have failed repeatedly? I'm pretty sure there is a lemon law that covers computers, have you looked into it?
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Video card x2, motherboard x4, power supply x2, display x2, keyboard, backlighting (2 different places). Current issue ??? perhaps CPU due to fan failure. Last time I successfully powered it up, the RAID status for the mirrored drives was "degraded", and I've been hearing some weird sounds coming out of one of the HDDs. So I suspect one of them is going also.

I've owned this laptop for 2.5 years. I've had 7 total service calls in the past year, including 4 in the past month. At this point, they are sending me a new system.
 
Neuronix said:
Video card x2, motherboard x4, power supply x2, display x2, keyboard, backlighting (2 different places). Current issue ??? perhaps CPU due to fan failure. Last time I successfully powered it up, the RAID status for the mirrored drives was "degraded", and I've been hearing some weird sounds coming out of one of the HDDs. So I suspect one of them is going also.

I've owned this laptop for 2.5 years. I've had 7 total service calls in the past year, including 4 in the past month. At this point, they are sending me a new system.
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I don't know what to tell you. The chance of your hard drive failing in any one year is about 1:200 to 1:400. These days the chance of any one component with no moving parts not already defective becoming defective is extremely small (motherboard, vga card, psu) This excludes documented failures like that one generation of nvidia cards. Depends what on the display actually failed (the cords and their connectors like to fail.) I'm also very impressed that you've had a back lighting failure again rated for about 50,000 hours. I mean if you added up the probabilities the chance of your experience being repeated would be very very remote but anything is possible.

Again you have to realize that Dell has lost on your purchase. If Dell did this all the time they would not still be in business 27 years later, they would have folded like Packard Bell etc.

However its been about 3 years now by industry standard its time to replace it anyway.
 
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justaregularmed said:
I don't know what to tell you. The chance of your hard drive failing in any one year is about 1:200 to 1:400. These days the chance of any one component with no moving parts not already defective becoming defective is extremely small (motherboard, vga card, psu) This excludes documented failures like that one generation of nvidia cards. Depends what on the display actually failed (the cords and their connectors like to fail.) I'm also very impressed that you've had a back lighting failure again rated for about 50,000 hours. I mean if you added up the probabilities the chance of your experience being repeated would be very very remote but anything is possible.

Again you have to realize that Dell has lost on your purchase. If Dell did this all the time they would not still be in business 27 years later, they would have folded like Packard Bell etc.

However its been about 3 years now by industry standard its time to replace it anyway.
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I don't know where you are getting your statistics on hd failure but they are just dead wrong. We changed Raid arrays regularly on our server farms. Obivously the IO access is at a greater rate than on a desktop HD, but I've had so many hard drive failures over the years, I can't keep count anymore. I've been using computers since the 1980s. There's lies, damn lies and statistics, but anyone who's been working in this field for any length of time knows that 1:200 per year is just ridiculous.
 
Groove said:
I don't know where you are getting your statistics on hd failure but they are just dead wrong. We changed Raid arrays regularly on our server farms. Obivously the IO access is at a greater rate than on a desktop HD, but I've had so many hard drive failures over the years, I can't keep count anymore. I've been using computers since the 1980s. There's lies, damn lies and statistics, but anyone who's been working in this field for any length of time knows that 1:200 per year is just ridiculous.
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Large vendors compensate for the bathtub curve by shipping RAID arrays made up of drives that vary by date of manufacture and sometimes location of manufacture as well. That way, a bad day at one factory does not result in you losing more drives than your RAID-level can tolerate.

My experience with all of my drives (sample size n=1 person here) is that once they make it past a year or so with no bad sectors / other oddities in SMART, they're generally good for a long time. The drives I've gotten from Newegg have all started throwing errors / failing within a few months.
 
You guys must have terrible luck. Any drive I've killed has been due to random physical trauma (I dropped it, etc...). In nearly two decades of owning PC's I've had exactly one drive fail from just regular use, and that was 12 years ago. I have some drives that are almost 8 years old that work just as well as they did when I first got them.
 
Groove said:
I don't know where you are getting your statistics on hd failure but they are just dead wrong. We changed Raid arrays regularly on our server farms. Obivously the IO access is at a greater rate than on a desktop HD, but I've had so many hard drive failures over the years, I can't keep count anymore. I've been using computers since the 1980s. There's lies, damn lies and statistics, but anyone who's been working in this field for any length of time knows that 1:200 per year is just ridiculous.
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Please look up Annualized Failure Rate, they pull a bunch of fun stuff from it. The number is derived from how many drives per 300-600k batch are expected to fail every year. I looked up one for my drive and extrapolated for you.

I looked up some segate 10k scsi's they have a AFR of 0.62%. This means out of (600k if that was the sample) they expect 3720 to fail per year, or like 1/141. Just for fun.
 
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justaregularmed said:
Just saying I ran a not top of the line dell laptop for nearly 3 1/2 years without turning it off, in no realm is the laptop designed to be used that way and it continues to run fine to this day (although I don't use it much). Its only 7 years old now.
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Are you aware that power cycling is what puts the most stress on computer components? That you left your laptop running for roughly 3.5 years without shutting it on or off only speaks to how impressive your air quality (or filters) are, in that the fans didn't clog up with dust in that time. It doesn't speak to the quality of the system.

justaregularmed said:
Again you have to realize that Dell has lost on your purchase.
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And how much time/productivity has Neuronix lost for his purchase? I have no sympathy for the companies. I'm only impressed that Dell was willing to go through so many replacements for him. It almost sounds like... Apple.
 
justaregularmed said:
Please look up Annualized Failure Rate, they pull a bunch of fun stuff from it. The number is derived from how many drives per 300-600k batch are expected to fail every year. I looked up one for my drive and extrapolated for you.

I looked up some segate 10k scsi's they have a AFR of 0.62%. This means out of (600k if that was the sample) they expect 3720 to fail per year, or like 1/141. Just for fun.
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Think about it this way... you ride your bike 10 miles a week and it lasts for 5 years before replacement parts are needed. Then you compare to the guy who rides his bike 100 miles a week and it needs replacement parts after 6 months.

Stop for a minute and think about the sheer load on a data farm, the raw number of i/o access per minute/hour/day by a corporation constantly querying back end DB's or DS's, NAS, etc.. HD's fail, all of them, and quite regularly (relatively speaking) in a corp environment which is why you have RAID in the first place. I don't care what the numbers say or frankly who calculated them. It's not a conspiracy theory. Work in the industry enough and you'll realize that component and HD failure is much more common than you think.

How do you think they calculated those numbers? You'd have to fix usage among your N population. You can't compare the guy who uses his computer 1 hour a day to surf the web to the guy who runs a webserver and data mines off his desktop system 24/7. It's like having a car with 15K miles at the end of the year and one with 100K at the end of the year and pointing fingers at the one that had parts fail. Well, no kidding.
 
To add, consumer usage patterns do not compare to enterprise patterns whatsoever. Consumer drives will park heads, spin up and down more often and generally be designed to consume less power. Enterprise drives on the otherhand are usually continuously spinning 24/7 as a member of a RAID array of some type. Even my home fileserver has 20 spindles spinning away at all times (made up of consumer models mostly), and most people with a similar setup report longer lifetimes for their drives when they're not parking heads/spinning up and down so often.

Pretty sure IT departments are replacing plenty of drives daily. Most RAID setups in the enterprise have several hot-spares, so the users notice nothing and the IT monkeys have time to toss in a new drive and send the old one back to Dell.
 
1UP said:
Now you're just being intellectually dishonest. You can't just discard data because it doesn't fit what you believe.
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I'm not sure who was arguing what side of the argument, but here is my view on it:

When you look at what makes up a mechanical harddrive, there is almost no reason to trust a solo drive, ever. It has a spindle that can spin at speeds up 10,000 rpm. It has a mechanical seeking head that can return random blocks of data to you from many platters in milliseconds. This ridiculous contraption is what you trust your data too, and is expecting to give you years of service. They also make enough of these to sell you terabytes of data storage for less than a hundred bucks.

These mechanical devices will fail eventually, and the only question is "when". And when they fail, they will take your data with them unless you pay for data recovery. Keep your data backed up in the cloud, on other drives (RAID) and off-site (cloud/external HDD in a safe somewhere).

I've got a IBM DeathStar 13.4GB from a 1997 Dell that still runs to this day. I also had a state-of-the-art Western Digital 640GB Black edition drive die in less than a week of use. Maybe IBM quality was better? Maybe the UPS guy played extra football with my WD? Maybe the WD factory had gremlins that day? I'll likely never know.

Moral of the story: mechanical devices will fail, back up your data. The entire concept of RAID was developed to add some resemblance of data security to mechanical storage.

E: Of course, solid-state storage is not immune to failure. There are just different failure modes, like firmware errors or the flash itself failing after so many read/write cycles. The only true data safety is having n+1 copies of your data in different locations. An external HDD in your safety deposit box is a cheap and good start.
 
I don't have anything else to really add to what Movax already explained very well. Those of us who have worked in the industry know the silliness of some of these statistics and difficulty in isolating static variables in order to extrapolate failure rates when many of these variables are completely non practical in a working corporate environment and many times in a desktop environment included.

As he said, if you want to use a Seagate AFR to help you sleep better at night, then keep doing what you're doing. Those of us who have learned the hard way over the years have regular backups. I even have multiple.

Even if you're at the simplest IT shop, you're usually going to have scheduled tape backups kept at offsite facility under lock and key. My last gig, I built an on-site datacenter, off-site datacenter with mirrored databases, synchronized in real time just in case one site went down, each server farm with raid arrays and NAS for yet other backups and even then kept some data in yet another off site storage. Not uncommon for the server admins to need to change one of the RAID drives at least once a month. Data redundancy and backup technologies is a thriving area of the industry, and for good reason.
 
Velocity said:
And how much time/productivity has Neuronix lost for his purchase?
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Dell made up for it. They sent me a replacement laptop. Except they don't make the XPS m1730 any more and didn't have any spares around. So they sent me a top of the line brand new Alienware. I'm again a happy Dell customer :D
 
Neuronix said:
Dell made up for it. They sent me a replacement laptop. Except they don't make the XPS m1730 any more and didn't have any spares around. So they sent me a top of the line brand new Alienware. I'm again a happy Dell customer :D
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Wow, I'm impressed! It sounds like they've upped their customer service game.

I've been out of the land of Windows for about four years now - how did you deal with setting up the new system? With Macs, you just use the Migration Assistant from the failed system (target disk mode) or from your "time machine" backup, and all of your programs and data are pulled over. It makes shifting between physical computers very easy. If I've heard it right, Windows 7 implemented a Time Machine-like system, but I'm not sure if it works that way.

Alternately, are you a Linux user? :) I know Linux has a good backup implementation.
 
Just posting to say I got my Asus RMA back, very quick service, they cleaned the entire thing and even preserved the OS. Replaced the keyboard as well (broken keys) even though they didn't have too.

Cheap laptops + good support services, excellent choice if on a budget.
 
lenat said:
The more manufacturers that embrace Linux, the more popular it becomes and the better hardware support we all get, so why not help out?
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Probably for the same reasons why people don't want universal healthcare. Everyone wants the benefits, but they don't want to pay more or experience difficulties of bringing it in themselves.
 
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