An unproductive month

April 18 - May 27, 2004
Background:

• Alienware called on April 7 to advise me that the Matrox card in their box was incompatible with their motherboard. Refusing to send a tech (under the onsite service contract we had purchased) to install a new disk controller, they guided us by phone, while my wife and I installed the disk controller card, set up a RAID, and loaded all of the system software.
• Soon after I had received the computer, I disabled the Matrox card--the Alienware computer was unstable in many ways, but several (far from all) seemed related to the Matrox video coprocessor. Alienware's technician encouraged me to keep the Matrox card in the system, to "get the value" of what I had paid for. He said this new disk controller would fix the problems. I accepted his advice.
• I ran a long series of tests on April 18 to see whether the reconfigured system had stabilized. It had not. I was getting errors working with Adobe Premiere Pro (which the Matrox card is designed to optimize) and other errors including I/O problems with a USB drive. The system might have been more stable than it was out of the box (with the Matrox card active) but it was less stable than I had gotten it myself from January to April (disabling the Matrox card), certainly too unstable to use to create more video lectures, which is what I had bought the computer to do.
  
• To achieve this unacceptable result, from April 7 to 18, I spent 70 hours preparing for, making, and troubleshooting the configuration changes. Becky spent an additional 10 hours. The system was out of use the entire time, preventing me from getting some important work done.
• Becky and I installed the card and set up the operating system under protest. Alienware's service claims and reputation had played a big role in our decision to pay top dollar for this $5000 computer and its 3-year onsite support service contract. Their website promises onsite support, but Alienware had flatly refused to provide it.

The machine needed more work. Alienware was unwilling to provide the onsite support that we believed we had contracted for, but they were willing to agree to let me send the computer back to Miami, where they would diagnose and reconfigure the machine. I was to run further diagnostics and then send the machine back for repairs.This is where we left off on April 18. Mail-in support, which other companies present as the economy option, was something they were willing to do for me as a favor.

The challenge was in developing a clear set of diagnostics, to tell whether the system was in fact fixed and stable. Alienware had not suggested any diagnostics. I have a couple of decades of technical experience, including a lot of software testing--creating diagnostics is certainly within my competence. But it takes work. It takes time.

I head a research lab. I have courses to teach, funding to get (so that I can pay my students' tuition and salaries), students/staff to supervise, research to do, articles and books to write, conferences to speak at, technical standards committees to work on. I routinely work 90 hours per week, had been working 110 hours per week over this last term. There's not much time left over to play diagnostic technician for a defective computer. It was an unwelcome new hobby.

The rest of April, and most of May, I went back to my real work and put the Alienware problems on hold. From time to time, I loaded new software or ran some new tests. I did some writing on this machine, but I did most of my work on my Macintosh. I had agreed to load and evaluate some interesting test tools, but that had to wait until I again had a reliable Windows system of my own.

The critical next step was to run a series of parallel tests on another computer. I could get Premiere Pro to crash on the Alienware system, I could get it to fail to export files, I could get this system to crash in other ways. But how many of these problems were with Premiere or Windows Media Player? Until I knew which problems were unique to my system, I wouldn't know which problems to expect to see fixed with a fixed system.

The Computer Sciences Department chair was happy with my video coursework and agreed to buy a video production computer for my lab. We had to wait for that to come in, then make a disk of test files for it, then run the tests so that I could isolate the problems unique to my defective Alienware machine.

We were finally ready to start second-system troubleshooting in late May. I created a data disk, but in the process, had serious problems with the USB and firewire external drives. In this post, I'll just say that I spent yet another overnight with this blasted machine, babysitting copying large files in small batches because the system was too unreliable to copy a large set of files at one time.

I had several other serious problems, in this first challenging use of the system (It's sad to think of copying 350 gigs of data as a challenging use of a computer) since April 18, but I'll detail them in the next post.

In May, I also checked other users' experiences when they sent computers back to Alienware for "depot support." The web is full of horror stories. It's easy to dismiss complaints about a vendor, but several details of several of the complaints now rang true to me. Here are a few examples:

• Alienware Area-51m v2.0: Horror Story
• http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Feb/ran20030225018247.htm (look for example at "Not Just Me!", "Add another Horror Story to the List", and "Worst Customer Service")
• http://www.fortsmithgamers.com/alienwareboycott.htm

Assuming that I did send the computer to Alienware, how long was it going to take to come back? With reports of delays of up to 45 days, I was deeply concerned. I had commitments for the summer. If this system was going to be gone most of June and July, I needed something else.

Let me summarize. By May 27, I had spent an additional 30 unproductive hours (at least) on this system, raising my total loss to 100 hours. The computer still didn't work. My research assistant and I were in the process of creating, at my expense, diagnostics to help us tell whether the allegedly-repaired computer we would get back from Alienware could be trusted or not. And I was seriously wondering whether I would be better off getting rid of this computer and getting something else, from someone else, that worked.