Alienware m11x R1 issues keyboard, battery, and overclocking

Question

I am posting my issues on this forum as a last resort. I have tried on multiple occasions to have this resolved via the technical support phone line. I purchased my R1 M11 in April of last year. I pretty much specked it out and with accessories and everything it totaled to about 1500 dollars. This is not my first Alienware laptop. I had such good results with my Alienware M9750 that I had no problem spending that amount for a portable computer for school and personal/DJ use. I spent nearly 3000 dollars on my M9750 and it gave me 5 years of a nearly perfect portable computing experience. I was so impressed with my M9750 that I decided I would never go with another laptop other than Alienware. When I saw the M11 released I thought it was a godsend. A netbook sized computer with performance to rival any 15 inch class laptop on the market. Boy, did I have no idea what I was getting myself into. I have had issues with this laptop starting from about 3 months into its use. The laptops screen hinge just snapped in half one day. I called Alienware who were prompt to send out a technician to replace the whole screen unit. The technician not only fixed my screen, but put the wrong screws into the keyboard area initially causing the keyboard to be unusable. I brought this up to the technician and he replied that 'it seemed that they never put the majority of screws into the screen hinge to begin with' and that that must have been what caused my initial problem. He put too long of screws into the area where they were missing and it damaged the keyboard. When he replaced them with the correct size the keyboard started working again, but performance degraded after that. I am now forced to write this post using an external keyboard, as the laptops has so many inoperable keys it is practically unusable.   My second issue is with the battery. I have noticed a decline in battery life for the past few months and thought nothing of it. I assumed it was simply that my use of the computer was going up. Now windows informs me that the battery is bad, as if I couldn't tell by the fact that I get ~10 minutes of battery life. I can't believe the battery would fail so quickly. The battery in my M9750 did not lose any of its capacity for over 3 years. I attribute this to the alienware buyout by Dell. I think build quality must have substantially declined since the acquisition I am absolutely appalled by all of these issues. My sister has a macbook pro she has been using daily for school for 3 years now without a single battery issue. Am I really expected to have to pay for a new battery every year? Is any laptop supposed to have a usable life of 1 year? This is absolutely ludicrous.   My third issue with this laptop is the false advertising perpetrated by Dell/Alienware. This laptop is not overclockable in a usable way. Usable is an overstatement. It is completely non functional. The performance figures advertised were achieved with the use of the overclocking feature which is so unstable that the laptop cannot even boot into windows 7. I am extremely disappointed by this. I use this laptop for some light gaming, but my real need for its performance is in music production/DJing. This laptop struggles to run Ableton live and Native Instruments Massive at the same time while maintaining a decent sound quality. I cannot even run Virtual DJ if any other programs are open. Even then the latency is absolutely atrocious. I hate this laptop.   Alienware has more or less told me on numerous occasions that there is nothing they can do. I now hate Aliewnware and their new parent company, Dell. I am a college student who is now forced to buy another laptop after slightly more than one year of use, which is going to strain me financially more than I already am. I wish I would have simply returned it when I discovered the non usability of the overclocking feature right after I purchased it. Now I feel like I've spent 1500 dollars on a broken laptop with less usability than a 300 dollar netbook. The only reason I decided to keep the laptop is that I was assured by Dell technical support that a fix was on the way for the overclock feature, that was a year ago. I can't believe I've actually been considering just biting the bullet and buying a M14x as a replacement. I can hardly afford any other laptops with the performance I require.   I know its a wall of text, but I thank everyone who takes the time to read this.

Corinator · Answer

Bump it

Locked Topics – Alienware General

Was this post helpful?