Dell buys out Alienware

In an attempt to spruce up it's dull high-end line, plus will indirectly add AMD processors to line:

http://www.theregister.com/2006/03/23/dell_buys_alienware/

Acadia

 

An accurate article as to what and why Dell needed to do, but I am a little sorry to see it happen.

If I were to buy Alienware machine I would prefer to know Dell had not tampered with the product line...they say they will not but how long will that last.

 

Oh God,

please tell me this is not true!

 

Gee, nothing wrong with Dell, I own 5, have a laptop and a bunch of other Dells at work. They work and the price is often mpore than fine.

I realize there are downsides. On my Dim 4500's, RAM tops out at 1 GB (which is what I have on all of them), by today's standards I have a somewhat slow 2.8 GHz/533 MHz FSB P4, the power supply is a tad on the lean side, but I've had no issues with it. HDD's have been upgraded for a while, all of them except the laptop have 200-300 GB (up from the stock installed 40 GB), which is plenty for the foreseeable future. Video cards were also upgraded to ATI Radeon 9600XT a while ago.

My experience may be unique, but it's 5 machines for 4 years. In that time:

• 1 laptop motherboard replacement by Dell at their cost at my home
• One HHD failure - gentle enough that all files were saved
• No software issues
• No performance issues
• One son uses his for hardcore gaming/homework, one uses it more of a music/video/homework center. The wife and I work at ours.

When I bought these 4 years ago, I shopped around for price/performance and watched closely for deals, none of the other options were even close.

One thing the purchase could bring - assuming they do keep Alienware as a premier brand (and they'd be dumb not to) - is access to volume discounts on some parts/components/software that could be a benefit to all. No need to ignore the potential upsides.

Blue

 

It's probably more likely that they would incorporate some of the Alienware hardware into their Dell lineups. As long as they don't Dell-ize their customer service/support, I don't see it as necessarily a bad thing, although it is surprising.

 

he,he! I second that emotion Pete.

I bought a Dell 21 months ago, a custom configured $4300.00 and they installed it in my house and the third morning I woke up one of the array HD'S went. I called tech support and this idiot had me on the phone for 3 1/2 hours inside the box fooling around, I kept asking him to give me a tier (because he didn't know what the hell he was doing) 2 Tech and he refused. By the time he got done with the computer it was totally inoperable.

Then Dell tells me they will send someone to fix it and the Tech will call me. I never heard from him, I had to track this fool down, by that time it was a week later when I spoke with him and I told him not to bother coming out that I was packing the computer up and sending it back.

Dell also informed me that I had
to reinstall all of the stuff on the computer and I said that's pretty funny I paid extra money for you guys to install this than I have to go through this, no way. Mind you, I went through the same type of thing with a Gateway before this that's why I bought the Dell.

Get this, after the computer was sent back to Dell they said I owed them $4300.00 by sending me nasty letters. Finally I got an attorney and they kept post poning the court date. My attorney said that's their way of running my pockets dry. So I ended up in financial mess at one point due to some real estate going south, so I filed bankruptcy on the S.O.B'S.

So guess what I ended up buying after the dell situation. You guessed it, an Alienware. I have had nothing but problems with this for a year and a half straight. It's a Athlon 64 FX-53.

It's been constantly shipped back and forth to be fixed. That's because for the first year they kept trying to fix it by using me as the guinea pig in the box before they would actully recognize the fact that they couldn't fix all this stuff over phone. Because of doing that it destroyed CPU and there was three Nvidea 6800 Ultra's replaced, not to mention the MOBO.

They shipped this computer to me with almost every driver was old, it couldn't function properly, (it constantly crashed so I couldn't even get to windows updates for all the rest I needed) that was the start of it and then everything else along the way escalated one by one on top of each other.

So because of this happening the OS needed to be reinstalled and because of that Win Promise Fasttrack driver their own techs couldn't get the OS installed. It had to be sent out everytime. And yes Alienware gives you an image on disk, but guess what, it was a bad image, it didn't work so they were trying to do it from scratch.

I asked for a refund and they refused. I went to my attorney and he said I would have to sue them in Florida where they are located and of course may lose the case and a lot of money.

I bought two laptops by HP and there was a recall on the memory sticks. When I took them in and they replaced the memory sticks with the same kind of memory that was recalled. They said this was their protocal. I paid for extended warranty's on both systems. The repair center was in the same Comp USA store I purchased the computers in. So I went around telling all the customers how they rip people off and what happened to me and they called the police to have me removed. I was livid. I had to fork the money out of my pocket to replace 2gig of ram. There were 1gig in each laptop. I'm sorry, but I have no trust in any of them anymore.

I will never ever buy another computer from any manufacturer again. I will build my own from here on in.

 

That's insane..

Always a good way to go, and newegg.com is your friend Just read the reviews, and get good brands.

 

http://www.tastycomputers.com

Pure quality and unbelievable service.

Acadia

 

I just purchased a new computer the 7th of march, I did a lot of research before I spent my money and one of the computers I investigated was AlienWare. Of all the computers I considered buying AlienWare had the most negative reports by actual owners. The major complaint was that customer support was just about non existant. Alienware is known for useing older versions of hardware that can't be upgraded especially with graphics cards. I decided to pass after reading about the hundred of reports and reviews found with a google search. Plus for the soft and hardware packages they offer they are way to expensive. Needless to say AlienWare was taj\ken off my list.

just a few reviews of alienware here http://www.epinions.com/cmhd-topic-Alienware_Computers_in_General

 

Do you mean me or them?

 

All in all, I know there are good manufacturers out there but unfortunatley I never got a hold of one and I don't want to try to find one after everything I have been through, I'm out of gas! So I will just stick to building my own.

Not everyone gets lucky!

 

Nice link. I can't believe their 30 day no strings attached guarantee and no restocking fee. Nice looking boxes. Too bad I didn't have this link when I was looking to buy.

 

Hi Pete,

I have seen those computers if I recall in Tiger Direct Magazine before I bought Alienware. I was looking them over but wasn't sure how reputable they were. Too bad I find out later.

I'm glad to know that it worked out well for you. It seems like the companies with all the hype (like Alienware) are the crap ones.

The ones that you don't hear a lot of hype, I mean smaller companies are better to deal with. At least it seems that way, just my opinion.

I went to Alienware because they were supposed to be the all mighty of gaming systems, boy did I get a surprise

 

I bought my TastyComputer almost two years ago. About 3-4 months ago my Sony DVD-ROM stopped working. I had hardly used the thing at all so I never even bothered to replace it. A couple of months ago I received an email form the owner of Tasty just "checking in" to see if everything was "OK" with the pc that they had built for me. I told him that I loved this machine but just happen to mention that my hardly used Sony DVD-ROM had died.

He emailed me back offering to reimburse me for the drive. I emailed him back again stating that I would think about it but that it really wasn’t his fault that a defective drive had come off of the Sony assembly line and, besides, that thing was about 6 months pass the warranty period.

Eventually I got around to replacing it and mentioned it in a thread at the forum that you see in my sig; the owner of Tasty just happens to also be a member of that forum. He happened to read my post in that thread and emailed me again saying are you still at the same address and don’t I want reimbursed. I emailed back, yes, I am at the same address but that I didn’t think that it was his responsibility and it was well past warranty.

Guess what came in the mail several days later – yup, a check.

Acadia

 

@Bigc73542

Too bad I never found those before I purchased. Live and learn.

At least the foundation is set for me when I'm ready to rip the guts out and rebuild when everything gets out dated. By that I mean the box, it's huge, you have a lot of room to put all kind of goodies in there.

I'm glad you didn't get caught up in buying an Alienware.

 

I do like the looks of some of the cases though, real scifi

 

@Acadia

That is awesome! Now see, they value their customers a 110%. It's too bad there aren't more companies like them. I fell in love with that one box, I think it's called the Thermaltake Shark.

 

My son-in-law bought a Dell against my advice. He also ignored my advice to install Rollback. His box did BSOD then froze up after 1 week. Now he is trying to learn to speak a foreign language (Swahili, Esperanto, Klingon, whatever) so that he can understand the Dell tech support. I bite my tongue to keep from telling him, "I told you so."

 

I'm surprised that you're not also out of money.

This is my strategy. Trust only yourself [and the helpful people in the Wilders forum] to your machine.

 

Arcadia,
What the hell is this?

 

Ain't got a clue, I never get anything, nor have I heard of anyone else. I'll contact the owner of Tasty and send him over here to look at the image that you posted.

Acadia