I configured and purchased an Alienware 17 R4 laptop at the end of November. It arrived during the first week of December and worked just fine for nearly one week. After that, the laptop wouldn't turn on no matter what I tried. Eventually Dell sent out a technician to my home to switch out the motherboard, the DC input, and the power cable/capacitor. That didn't fix the issue, and the technician simply said "good luck."

After that, Dell had me send the laptop to its repair facility in Texas. After a diagnosis was made, a part was needed for the fix.... which Dell's facility conveniently didn't have. That was on January 13, and then on January 19 the laptop was put on engineering hold. The repair didn't start again until January 26.

Now it's February 1 and the laptop is still in repair status. The Dell Repair Status page doesn't provide any new updates, and a call into technical support tells me that the repair is now waiting for a new screen and there's no ETA for when it will arrive. I still have no idea what the first part was that Dell was waiting on in early January.

This is just silly. A brand-new, just-built Alienware gaming laptop worked for an entire week. Outside that week, it's either sat like a huge brick or residing at Dell's facility waiting on mystery parts. I'm just wondering how a repair facility doesn't have the parts it needs to fix its products, and how a just-built product could be so screwed up that it's taking almost two months to fix.