In February of 2008 my loving wife bought me an Alienware Area 51 M9750 laptop for Valentine's day, to help me make productive use of the down time during a four week training TDY. The total cost for this extravagant (and amazingly considerate) show of affection was $2,864.23--which was a lot of moolah for a frigging laptop in 2008 (still is, for that matter).
Immediately the laptop had an issue, in that despite being supposedly state-of-the-art for gaming wouldn't run most of the games I put on it, no matter if they were recent or older. It came with Vista; I figured that was the problem and loaded XP SP2. Same issues, precisely. Odd. After a few days it began to reboot spontaneously, which it still does. As a result of this quirk (probably a motherboard issue), I can't really use it for anything.
In August of 2008, I finally had enough and contacted Alienware customer "support." After several days of exchanging emails in which they apologized but refused to do anything about it, my final response from them was "You are a valued customer and we apologize for the inconvenience caused." That's it. Not even a "Here's a Return Authorization number; send it back and we'll come up with a way to claim it was your fault." So, I just wrote it off as an expensive mistake and carried on with my life.
When Dell took over Alienware, I was hopeful that customer service might now consist of something less Douglas Adamsesque than simply, "we apologize for the inconvenience." I gave them a few months to get Alienware fully integrated into the company and then tried again.
The chief problem with Dell Customer Service is that it resembles an IQ test: there are a lot of questions and puzzles to solve and then...nothing happens. At least with an IQ test you get a score at the end. They insist on you having a bunch of numbers you won't have if you bought your Alienware machine prior to the merger; if you try an alternate route as a result you get exactly nowhere, or at least Igot exactly nowhere. Needless to say, I will never buy another Alienware anything, and strongly discourage any of my readers from making the grave mistake of falling for their probably largely self-generated reputation, as well. I even went so far as to praise Alienware Area 51's in my first novel. The next time they appear in one of my novels it won't be in a positive light, I promise you.
So, in summary, my wife paid $2,864.23 to buy me a rubberized paperweight, for which the scoundrels who sold it to her "apologize for the inconvenience caused" but nothing more.
Oh, but it does have a cool alien face on the lid.
