One last try to fix the machine. (No luck.)

June 10 - June 27, 2005

(Note: My gripe is with Alienware, not with any of its individual staff. To prevent this from reading like a personal attack on some of Alienware's staff, I am using obviously fictitious names instead of real names. I refer to the primary technician who worked with me as Larry, to Larry's boss as Mo, and to a third staff member as Curly.)

By June, I was getting desperate to get my computer working. I had a long stack of work that needed to be done and the machine was (still) down. Alienware wanted me to ship it back to them, but they weren't offering any information, even in response to direct questions, about how long the machine would stay in their shop.

I decided to make one more effort to get this machine working. The two most obviously problematic components were the defective RAID controller that had most recently taken down the system and the Matrox card, so I decided to pull both out of the system, leaving a fairly generic system that would be slower, less data-secure, worth much less (comparable to a system I can put together at Best Buy, with a long service contract, for about $1500 instead of Alienware's $5400), but much easier to troubleshoot.

This would be a simple change to the system--yank two cards, reformat the drives, reinstall the operating system. I asked Alienware for an onsite technician to do it (after all, we were taking out a RAID controller that they agreed was defective) but they said no.

I hired my own onsite technician and with Alienware on the phone (Alienware has to be involved whenever you open the box, or it voids the warranty) the tech pulled the cards, reloaded the operating system, reloaded the other system software that came with the computer, and for almost a week, the computer seemed to be work.

I didn't trust the machine, so I would check it out first before doing any real work on it. I did my real work on a borrowed computer, and as a parallel task on this system, I loaded some applications (Premiere, Firefox, Norton), installed updates, copied my data back onto the hard drives, ran some diagnostics....

And after a week, the hard disk (system drive) crashed.

I send Larry an email reporting the failure, and he responded:

Unfortunately, the problem described in your e-mail seems to indicate a problem with one of the hard drives on the system.

In order to run a test on the hard drives, Western Digital has a utility to create a bootable CD that will analyze your hard drives and give you a report of it.

You can download the image file from http://support.wdc.com/download/dlg/Diag504cCD.iso.

Another approach to the problem will be unplugging the main hard drive (Connected in the port 0 of the motherboard) and then try to install windows on a different hard drive. Once this is done, we will be able to test each hard drive to determine the source of the problem.

If possible, just let me know a proper time to call you back in order to help you with this procedure.

As always from Larry, the note was warm and courteous. But the choice was clear--send the computer back to Alienware for a no-they-won't-tell-me-how-long period of time, or spend time without limit trying to get this (stripped down) system working.

Enough was enough. I ordered a new computer from another company.

I wrote Larry and Mo asking for a refund. (Mo said no.)

I wrote President@alienware.com asking for a refund.

In early June, I concluded my note to Mo with:

My proposal today is cancellation of the sale. If we go much beyond this, your costs will probably escalate a lot faster than mine.

I know how to gradually bring more and more pressure to bear on a company that won't honor its promises. It was time to start that work.

My next few posts will lay out the plan I developed for bringing pressure onto Alienware. You might find them useful next time you have a problem with Alienware or some other computer vendor.