At one time both Dell and Alienware were held in high esteem both as solid computer makers and (in the case of Alienware) the top-of-the-line gaming system manufacturer. Once I started speaking with people about Alienware, I came to realize that I made a huge mistake in picking up this turd of a system.
A little over a year ago for my birthday, I decided to buy myself the gaming machine that I’ve always wanted. The thing is that I have a tendency to buy older, cheaper products because top-of-the-line end up falling under the rules of Moore’s Law. But I figured what the hell, I was making decent money and I wanted to treat myself to something special for once. The gaming platform I ended up getting was an Alienware Aurora R4. The picture showed a really nerdsexy box with some cutting edge colors and components. The thing was that I figured that if I were going to be paying good money, why not invest in something that could theoretically take me for a good few years without worry?
Here’s a little dirty secret that I’ve noticed about Dell products over the years: they’re built intentionally with flaws in them. For instance, I bought a Dell laptop back in 2005 around the same time as another friend of mine picked one up. It was nearly identical. Around the same time both of our hard drives failed. It was horribly maddening since I had a ton of data that I could not easily recover on my drives. Of course, they failed roughly around when the warranty was going to expire, leading me to suspect that Dell secretly had put a time bomb in their drives to get paranoid tech unsavvy people to get feared into picking up the upsell.
This time with my Aurora R4 it didn’t take a year before I noticed things starting to fall apart. First, the wireless just stopped working. I had to jiggle it to fix it which is really odd because I never really have moved my system after I purchased it. Not only that but it’s just a cable located just slightly off from the fan. So how in the world did the wireless fail based on movement?
Next, the Blu-Ray drive has stopped functioning. I don’t know if this is due to me not putting back all the components in the correct manner after fixing the wireless problem. If that was the case, then I will say that the maze of unnecessary complexity inside of the case is ridiculous. I had a horrible experience just trying to get beneath the layers of panels that hid the motherboard. Pretty much unless you have squirrel paws, there isn’t any simple manner to delve into your case without possibly causing some other damage that you don’t know about.
Now, for no apparent reason, I went to boot my system up and found out that I’m getting a system level failure. It seems like the motherboard might be going. The system gave a pronounced and disturbing beep while slowly loading Windows up. Afterwards, I ran the diagnostics software which mentioned that I had an RTC Accuracy Test failure. I really have no idea how and why this error has occurred outside of the fact that I had a few power failures that inadvertently shutdown my system. I don’t know just how severe the random shutdown could adversely affect my computer or if, indeed, the power failure was responsible. It could simply be that the motherboard in general is crap and that most of the components are crap.
Around March, I got a call from Dell who got me to extend my warranty. Seeing that I paid a certain amount, I figured that I should get some additional life just in case these situations happen (and the fact that I just don’t trust Dell anymore). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they do this because I believe that they know internally that their systems are absolute crap. So fortunately, I did extend the warranty a few years as I’ll probably end up getting a new system eventually.
That said, after learning of this issue, I decided to contact their tech support. Guess what? They’re only open between 8am-12pm CST. Oh and on top of all this there’s a little note saying that my product does not qualify me for additional support. WTF?!?!?!! Isn’t that what the warranty is for?
Either way, this is the last straw for me with Dell. It’s obvious that the reason why the company is failing is because their products and support are absolutely worthless and that their only intent is to continue to upsell to you so that you’re in this loop of constantly breaking systems. I have no sympathy if the company gets put out and the fact that they’re so desperately trying to sell off to improve themselves demonstrate even further what a soulless behemoth the company has become.
For all the assholisms that Steve Job might’ve portrayed, the one thing is that at least he demanded standards. I don’t know if other leaders in the industry feel the same way, but I feel at this point in time, the computer manufacturing world is in utter shit. I don’t know if Tim Cook really gives a crap enough to continue pushing Apple to be the leader but I do know a lot of people just shook their heads when they saw the next generation of iOS being a Windows Mobile clone. Man, if these companies just care about bottom lines, what’s going to save us when we really need good products?