Alienhead and Chassis LED at front of AURORA R4 pulse from red to yellow, when the PC is switched off !! IS THIS NORMAL?

Is it being shutdown or is it going into sleep mode? It will do the yellow to red when it is booting up/shutting down or going in/out of sleep. If only the Alienhead is staying on after a full shutdown then its something with ACC. Try changing the sleep mode in ACC to a black Alienhead light and see what happens.

The Alienhead and front bottom LEDs will stay on sometimes when you power off. It is a known bug in the ACC that has never been fixed. All you can do is pull the power plug and hold the power button for 10secs. That will reset it but it will do it again. Mine does it about every 10 starts.

Your left side panel will also flash to another color now and then. Also a known bug that was never fixed.

Hi All

Thanks for your replies.. I have turned the hibernate ACC settings to black so It appears that there are no bugs now.  But I will always know it is there.  

Dell. Come on and sort out your buggy software. The flashy lighting is one of your selling points I'm sure, get it right!

Hello everyone!

I am posting here because I have the same issue, but in my case is when the computer is on, I got a yellow to red pulse, when I booted windows it was working fine, but then all of a sudden it changed, non of the lights are on, only this yellow to red pulse.

Before this happened, I uninstalled the Alienware Control Center to get rid of the "Thermo controller" which is buggy most of the time and just crashes after being load or just doesn't show any temperature. Do you think it can be because of this?

If you could tell me what is going on, would appreciate it.

Thanks in advance

I uninstalled the Alienware Control Center to get rid of the "Thermo controller" which is buggy most of the time and just crashes after being load or just doesn't show any temperature. Do you think it can be because of this?

Ok, Thanks for your reply!

The lights are working again as I last set them up even without having installed the ACC again. But as I am not going to change them atm, I guess it's fine.

So, whenever the light of the Alienware head pulses from yellow to red means that there is a software issue?

I would like to know that because it's not the first time I see this. It also happens when for example my Steelseries Engine crashes, but I've also seen it when there's a hardware issue (graphics card not working for example).

Is there a way to define what is going on by the pulse or one can just guess there's something wrong and that's it?

Thanks again :)

HI,

My problem was with the lights dynamically changing from yellow to red while the PC was powered down.  I also had a faulty motherboard out of the box, 2 of 4 DIMM slots were knackered.   While gaming this would result in a lack of resources causing the PC to fail over into sleep mode before eventually restarting.  When in sleep mode the Alien FX lighting would change to the yellow to red loop again.  It seems like the ACC is confused at the point of the PC shutting down.  It seems to get stuck in hibernate/sleep mode rather than progressing to a shutdown state.  Perhaps when SteelSeries Engine crashes the PC it goes into sleep mode (triggering the yellow to red lighting transition) before actually restarting.

Is the Steelseries engine causing the system to crash completely? If you change the "Startup and Recovery" Windows7 settings to not automatically restart at system failure you will see the blue screen of death when the PC actually fails.  this will also help identify what is causing steelseries engine to crash.

If you then create a new profile for the FX lighting in ACC and change the hibernate loop to dynamically change from black to black you will see whether lighting will turn off / fade to black (rather than yellow to red)  when your PC is powered down and also whether or not it will pulse yellow to red when your system crashes. 

This would show that the lighting is acting it seems, in the same way as most other alienware owners.  The lighting is going onto its hibernate/sleep setting at failure/power off.

You would then need to look into why your system is crashing, by looking at logs in event viewer and using the info from the blue screen of death.Blue Screen Error Codes:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms681381(v=vs.85).aspx

If the FX lighting starts to go funny without system crash i.e going white all over at startup, you could try dissipating the power on the MIO board by unplugging the power cable at the back of the PC and then holding down the power on button until the alien head led goes out.  (power your PC down before doing this).

Good Luck

G

I know this is from an old post but this happens to me as well.   Is there a fix now to turn the Alienhead light completely off while the computer is off? 

Go to the Command Centre, then the FX lighting section and set the light behaviour (when the PC goes to sleep) to change the colour to black.  This will stop the lights staying on when the PC is "Off".