m15 R4, failed two times in a year, terrible quality

Question

I bought my first Dell Alienware laptop m15 R4 on 8/2/2021. The price is higher than other brands but I heard the quality of Alienware is very good. Since I need a powerful computer, I think: "ok, let's give it a try." At first, everything is satisfying. The machine works smoothly.

On 6/10/2022, the keyboard of my laptop suddenly didn't work. It just didn't respond to any buttons I pressed, and it's less than a year since I bought it! I called Dell technical support, and after lots of back-and-forth calls and emails, they came to replace my keyboard. However, the keyboard failed again after two days, so Dell asked me to send my laptop to their company for a complete check, and this time they replaced the main logic board. It was 6/30/2022. I thought everything was resolved then.

Unfortunately, on 10/10/2022, the same problem happened again! However, my 1 year warranty has ended, and I cannot chat with Dell technicians anymore except the virtual chatting robots! Also, it's 102 days from the last replacement (6/30/2022), and Dell only warrants their fixing replacement 90 days! What a joke! It's ridiculous that such a high-level and pricey laptop fails two times within a year, and Dell has no responsibility for this! This never happens in my old laptops from any other brands. I'll never buy any products from Dell again!

BlackRose_777 · Answer

Might be a long shot, but did you try the "power button hard reset" method? I had the keyboard in my Alienware x17 R1 stop functioning a couple times and I resolved it by performing the hard reset with the power button:

1) Turn off the laptop and plug out the power cable

2) Press the power button and keep it pressed for 30 seconds.

3) After that, press the power button again to boot up the laptop and see if the problem persists.

4) If this does not help, try to unplug the battery from the laptop (by temporarily unplugging the ribbon that goes from the battery to the motherboard) and try the hard reset again.

For some reason, my laptop did this a couple of times, but it "repaired itself" after performing 2-3 of these hard resets.

mattyb3 · Answer

@shl2266ss Make sure that the system BIOS is up to date. A few models were impacted by similar issues which were fixed recently with a BIOS update

https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=vn89n&oscode=wt64a&productcode=alienware-m15-r4-laptop

shl2266ss · Answer

Thanks for your suggestion. I'll try it and let you know what happens later. One question: does this solve your problem all at once? After this power button hard reset, was your keyboard functional temporary and failed again after some time (like a month)?

BTW, I found that my problem and temporary solution are exactly the same as the following post: m15 R4, keyboard not responding, as below

Shutdown Laptop
Turn On Laptop
Keyboard will not work
Press power button to enter sleep mode
Resume Laptop from sleep mode
Login/Unlock laptop (I use the On Screen Keyboard by clicking on Accessibility in bottom Right) to enter my Password
Open Device Manager
Go to Universal Serial Bus Controllers
Uninstall the Unknown USB Device
Then Right Click Scan for hardware changes
Keyboard works again till next shutdown/restart.

This makes me wonder that the problem is the driver/firmware mismatch. However, my keyboard is Per-key version, not the 4-zone version, and Dell doesn't provide the corresponding firmware update (the Keyboard Firmware Update Utility on Dell driver downloading page cannot be installed on my laptop), so I don't know how to solve this now.

shl2266ss · Answer

Thanks for your suggestion, but I've updated my BIOS to the latest version 1.14.0 already. It doesn't work.

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m15 R4, failed two times in a year, terrible quality

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