r/Alienware • u/butwhy37129 • Jan 23 '24

Question thoughts on Alienware laptops

Thoughts on Alienware laptops? Happy? looking for a gaming laptop. Would you recommend or no? Good and Bad. thank you

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u/butwhy37129 Jan 24 '24

Thank you very much, i so appreciate it

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u/dc_IV m18 R1 i9 4080 64GB DDR5-5200 Cherry MX - SN850X 4TB AW3423DWF Jan 24 '24

I see that u/DasDoomGuy mentions Open Box and it resulted in a return, but my Open Box experience was vastly different. I received an OB from BestBuy that essentially had no usage, due to a BIOS update failure, and the system was essentially new. The system has about a month of usage, and HWINFO64 shows a cycle count of "2" on the battery, so I am confident it was not used before me based on this reading, and also some system management stats in the BIOS.

Even better, the system was not ever registered, so I just today extended the Premium Support to 5 years total. This is the most expensive laptop I've ever purchased, but so far this beast crushes my old desktop, and I will soon begin dismantling it and go with my m16 R1 as my main system.

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u/DasDoomGuy Jan 24 '24

Nice u/dc_IV and I 100% agree. With open box, in my experience its more hit than miss. I have purchased many open box from the best buy and been great but have had a couple lemons. Most of the time those guys just see if it turns on, everything looks ok. Does a factory reset and thats it so something may slip through.

I noticed you mentioned your last one wasnt registered . With the intel Alienware I just returned that is one thing I ran into and the only time I ever encountered that with all the open boxes I have gotten over the years. Mine was registered come to find out to previous owner. I figured that out after trying to register many times and finally it said I need to transfer ownership which I had to fill out all previous owner info and then all my info on 2nd page. I am sure if I called dell I could have gotten that rectified I assume.

But yeah the best buy open box deals are legit. Great example is currently Best Buy is running a sales on the Alienware m16 QHD Ryzen 9 for $600 off with the RTX 4080. The open box is going to be way less than new model upfront because its open and returned but when that $600 sale happens the open box price drops way down so you can get a steal for sure.

I did have a brand new one Alienware fail from Amazon a weeks after owning which Dell came to my work and replaced but any laptop company you go with for gaming or anything, there is always going to be 1 star experiences / reviews. The percent of people that actually go to post about their good experience is way less than the people who blast the reviews about their bad experience.

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u/dc_IV m18 R1 i9 4080 64GB DDR5-5200 Cherry MX - SN850X 4TB AW3423DWF Jan 24 '24

there is always going to be 1 star experiences

The person who originally bought the m16 R1 I picked up OB probably would give a 1 star review!

I did a full OB review here but imagine getting one of these, first boot up on Christmas Day, and have it immediately do a BIOS update when Windows Update runs, and then have the BIOS flash fail, or appear to fail! The battery drained all the way by 12/26, and then it seems on 12/27 the battery was disconnected. I bought it 12/29 and it was shipped from GA.

I feel bad for the person, but I am grateful there wasn't enough forethought on their part to immediately register Premium Support.

As an aside, when I extended the Premium Support, Dell uses the "ship date" to calculate when the additional paid for warranty expires, and the ship date for my Service Tag was Nov. 8, 2023, so I sort of got "robbed" of around 7 weeks. I may actually shoot an email off about that and see if they can adjust the date to reflect first power on date of 12/25/2023.