Mar
16
What happened to Alienware?
Filed Under Computer |
At my former company (not yet ex-company, but they’re working on it…) we needed good, fast development laptop computers. There were times when we’d have to send out an engineer to a remote site (Turlock, anyone) to debug and fix problems. This would often involve fixing a software problem, building it and deploying it on the spot. This meant that we needed a Pentium IV class processor, and not a centrino.
At the time we were looking, one company met our needs, alienware. The machines were kind of big and heavy, but they were fast, had a nice keyboard and display, and were durable. When we went from 15″ to 17″, they were even faster, but they were bigger and started to verge on being “luggable” and not “portable”. Still, they worked great and were very reliable. In two years, we had one service call on the 10 or so machines we bought. It turned out that the fan on the graphics card was not working properly because somehow a ball point pen spring had worked it’s way inside the air vent and was preventing the fan from working properly.
At my new company, we decided to replace the Dell models that nobody liked. Having had luck with alienware in the past, we picked an alienware model.
Disaster ensued.
For starters, Windows does an absolutely wretched job of font scaling, when it does it at all. The end result was that the beautiful 15″ 1920×1200 LCD screens were unreadable for many, and it could not be adjusted. Several key applications either didn’t scale, or scaled in an inconsistent way. This is supposed to be better in Vista. However, some of the apps aren’t tested in Vista, and some (like the VPN) do not work. So, Vista was not an option.
Furthermore, the machines were not reliable at all. Several of the machines had LCD display problems. Most of the machines had problems with the wireless card. Most of the machines could not sync properly to an external display without a reboot, if at all. Repeated attempts at RMA and repair have not seemed to fix these problems, either.
It seems that the Dell part of alienware is starting to shine through.