Review: Buying an Alienware Area-51m 7700 Mobile Computer
Experiences with Alienware Support
Around October 2005 I started experiencing some issues with the system. From time to time, when I would turn on the system, and sometimes also after a few hours of being on, the screen would flicker, almost like the backlight intensity was being decreased and increased really fast for about a second or two with three second intervals in between. This would stop when I would close the screen and open it again.
It seemed like something was probably not connected well, possibly the cable connecting the screen to the motherboard. I sent an email to Alienware support to ask for some more information and described the problem. I got a response within 2 hours explaining that perhaps the LCD cable needed to be reseated, asking me to contact Alienware technical support and to use the information on this link as a reference. I was quite busy at the time, and the screen flickering issue was a minor problem so I didn’t have time to call. However an Alienware support engineer did try to contact me by phone in the following days, as I later found out, but was unable to reach me.
On or around December 27 2005, I woke up that morning and tried to turn on the system and just got a blank screen. The night before I had used the system without any issues and when I was done I put it into sleep mode. The next morning when I turned it on, the lights went on, the fans seemed to turn on as well, but the screen didn’t seem to turn on, not even the backlight. In addition, it didn’t appear that the system was completing the POST routine and was booting into Windows. I decided to call to Alienware support about the problem. I got to talk to a support engineer who told me my case was already assigned to someone (it seemed the case was assigned since I reported the screen flicker problem), and that I’d have to wait for him to help me. He did decide to do some basic troubleshooting with me right away to save some time. As he guided me on the phone, we tried reseating the LCD cable, clearing the BIOS, removing some components like memory, hard disks etc. one by one to see if we could get the system to POST. So far my experiences with the support engineers were very good, they were very patient and friendly.
Nothing worked, and the only thing left to try was the videocard. I had to wait for the other engineer to call me later that day so we could try the videocard and do some more troubleshooting. I finally got the call in the evening the next day (I was told the engineers were very busy, that’s why it took so long) from someone named Jonathan. I did some more troubleshooting with him guiding me on the phone. We removed the videocard, cleaned the GPU and heatsink, put some new thermal compound and put it back in to see if that would help. We tried an external display as well, but that didn’t seem to work either.
At this point Jonathan said we had two options, Alienware could send me a new videocard, as we suspected the problem was probably the videocard, or, I had to send my system back to Alienware. The second option would cost me more and would take much longer since I am an international customer (although Alienware would replace parts and do repairs under warranty, I would have to pay for shipping myself). So I decided to take the risk and try the new videocard first, it would cost me less and would be faster. The order was placed on December 28 2005, and I got an email notification confirming it. In the following days I tried to get a tracking number from Alienware, but this seemed to be a lot more difficult than I would have imagined. I emailed to support asking for a tracking number and all I got back was a confirmation that the videocard shipped on December 29th, and that I had to call to customer service to get the tracking number. Finally I did call to customer service on January 6 2006 being a little tired of waiting and not yet having received anything, thinking that the videocard was already shipped, only to hear that it had not yet shipped and that it would ship that same day. I was then able to get the trackingnumber. I asked several people why it took 7 days to ship the videocard, after I had confirmation that it shipped on December 29th, and nobody seemed to know. Something probably went wrong at their shipping department.