I was very excited about owning an Alienware computer when I placed my order at the end of March (a month ago). I received the 15" R2 laptop with the 128GB SSD and 1TB hard drive and the 970 graphics card the 2nd week of April. It arrived on Friday, and that weekend I had 2 blue screens of death and several memory crashes. I called Alienware on Monday and they said the issues were serious enough to issue an exchange laptop. The 2nd laptop arrived a few days later, and 6 days later I experienced a new blue screen of death error message and the computer totally crashed. I called Alienware again that night and they had me run a diagnostic that showed an issue with the hard drive. Alienware said they could issue a refund or another exchange. At this point I'm skeptical of the 15" R2 units as I'd received two broken units already. I told them I'd rather just upgrade to the 17" R3 model and they said they can't do that, that I'd have to have a refund issued then order a new unit seperately. The problem is that Alienware will not issue a refund on their broken products until they receive the broken unit first, which takes 2 weeks. Then it takes 31 days to see a refund reflected on your account. Then it takes another 2 weeks to receive another computer. That's TWO MONTHS for Dell/Alienware to process returns for their defective merchandise and send a new unit out to the customer. Totally unacceptable! On top of all of that I've talked to 2 dozen employees of Dell/Alienware and every one of them has a different story of the policies and procedures in place of the company they work for. Dell has FORCED me to keep a broken computer now because it is unreasonable to make a customer wait 2 additional months to get a new one. When you spend this amount of money you expect to get a working product, and I am left with nothing but sheer shock and disappointment for Dell and Alienware as a company, and for their total lack of inter-communication between their customer service departments and lack of knowledge among their staff. This has been the worst buying experience I've ever had to deal with, and I hope nobody else ever has to go through this much frustration.
