17 R3, bad buying experience

Question

I bought Alienware on May 18, 2017. The purchased warranty expired on May 18, 2018. The cost of this laptop is 4 times the Dell Studio I had bought years back. Dell Studio's good performance led me to the buying decision of Dell's Alienware. But my personal experience has not been great. Plus it seems worst when I think about the money I have invested.

1. From very beginning I got annoyed by Dell's already installed softwares that used to show up errors from time to time regularly every day. After many months of tolerating it, I finally got rid of them by uninstalling Dell software.
2. The screen off mechanism was completely messed up. I later found anything that made the screen off ( sleep, hibernate or even screen off itself) could crash the computer unpredictably. My system used to crash at least 2-3 times last year. And recently it crashed every 7-8 days. Total around 20-30 times till now.
( I am not sure if it is windows 10 issue though )
3. Some days ago it crashed permanently making my laptop dead. And the repairing guy suspects about motherboard failure. It's just 3 years.
4. I have also been hearing that there have been some manufacturing defects with processor (intel) that too is causing frequent crashes in windows.

Overall I regret the decision of buying such expensive laptop. May be it is not Alienware or Dell problem specifically but it was a bad investment of course.

A51-06 · Answer

Sorry about the issues you've been having.

Vishwas Gagrani · Answer

What is the approximate cost of the motherboard for this computer? Is their an amazon link you can share here?

ejn63 · Answer

Try parts-people.com -- they run from $500 for an i5 board to $700 for a i7.

A51-06 · Answer

I’d just get a used model off of eBay or Facebook as the motherboard prices are whack and they’re used so at the most they’re refurbished.

Vishwas Gagrani · Answer

I saw the warranty has been red-lined for some reason. So need to make a correction in that regard if details related to warranty date is that important.

The laptop was purchased at 19-may-2017 . And original warranty was only till november-2017. Which I then pointed out and asked the dell store owner to extend it for at least 1 year. That is 18-may-2017. Upon request he extended it to 18-may-2017 without any additional cost.
I have everything in record.

A51-06 · Answer

So did he replace it then?

Vishwas Gagrani · Answer

No. New board is very costly. I am trying to look into some other alternatives. May be a new computer. Or refurbished mother-board.

ejn63 · Answer

Any board you buy will be refurbished and likely be north (well north for an i7) of $500.

There are no low cost options for board replacement.

Even a "repair" of the existing board -if it's possible - will likely involve a diagnostic fee plus a minimum of a few hours of labor, assuming a shop can even repair it, which will quickly put the price on par with a replacement.

A51-06 · Answer

I’m gonna go agree with that because I don’t think it’s worth the money to buy a motherboard or get it fixed as I can find 17 R4s on Facebook for $600 and it’s an i7 model with the GTX 1070 graphics.

Alienware

17 R3, bad buying experience

Was this post helpful?