My alienware's power supply stopped working out of the blue. I had paid the extra $300 for the waranty, so I called them up and explained the problem to them. I described the symptoms and how I knew it was the power supply that had failed, but they still insisted on walking me through their step by step diagnosis (including "is the power cable plugged in"). After almost an hour of talking to someone reading me a script, the guy decided I needed to send my whole system in.
I didn't want to deal with shipping the whole tower and having them wipe out my hard drive, so I offered to send just the power supply at MY expense. They could test it on one of their systems and if it was working fine they could send it back to me at MY expense. Otherwise, send me a new power supply; I bought a waranty for a reason!
No-can-do. I asked how I was supposed to back up my hard drive if I couldn't even boot my system, and I'm not allowed to take it to any other professional backup service (that would void my waranty). They said I should find a friend to put my hard drive into his computer and back my stuff up. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
I could go on, but basically every time I call them I feel like I'm in a battle to get any useful assistance. I bring up logical solutions to problems they've created and I get scripted responses that make me feel like I'm talking to a robot.
After my experiences, I would never recommend an Alienware to anyone, unless their customer service got a complete makeover.
After laying out the pros and cons of whether to buy a laptop from Dell or Alienware I made my decision on Alienware's web site's promise to deliver by 9/5/2006. I needed this computer for a project. I let its customer service reps know this on several occasions. Two out of three were rude. The third, Sven, was of the most help... But, after many emails and calls, they shipped on 9/21/2006. They shipped it SLOW FedEx. It is now 2:40PM on 9/26/2006 and the laptop is still on FedEx's truck.
What Alienware did was loose my company's business. We were in the process of establishing a laptop standard. We had plans to order five more, then more as we perform subsequent company-wide upgrades.
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