My dad, my friend and myself purchased several Alienware Laptops at or close to the same time. I did the research on which laptops were best and based my decision purely on specs... biggest. Mistake. Ever. Anyway so we ordered 3 of the Alienware Area 51M's (with 2080's) to use for work and some occasional gaming (we work on 3D graphics so this GPU makes sense). For a time... it was good. But right after the warranty ends, literally ALL of our graphics cards go bad within months of each other!!! First the screen starts to glitch with green or purple or red lines (seems to be random) when we do GPU-intensive tasks... then, soon after the glitching, the computer will crash. I assumed it was the graphics card going bad from the signs but I spent hours and days and weeks of troubleshooting, testing and researching anyway. I mean I tried everything imaginable (besides replacing the GPU) to fix this... Finally, I reached out to Dell tech support (Dell owns Alienware) to tell them that my GPU has gone bad... First of all, they literally don't have anyone in their technical (or other) support that speaks English natively so you can barely understand them and they can barely understand you.... so conversations go at a snails pace - because you have to repeat everything 4 times and so do they. And no, I don't have an accent or anything, I speak perfect English and annunciate my words flawlessly. Second: Dell tech support is THE most incompetent people I have ever encountered in my entire life. It's literally like every call you have with them - it's their first time discovering that they sell computers or what a computer even is. I literally had to explain what an SSD was to one of them!! He literally didn't know that an SSD was a hard drive. Embarrassingly stupid. And it wasn't just this one rep either. They were all completely incompetent. I might as well have asked my grandmother to fix my computer. Anyway so I explained that my GPU is bad and provide evidence... but of course they have to follow a script and ask if I tried turning it off and on again, then they take me through a dozen more steps, then they say we need to setup a time for them to call and remote in... but of course when that time comes around, they don't call or remote in. So you have to call them back, explain everything that you explained to the first guy, go through all the troubleshooting steps AGAIN no matter how many times you tell them you already went through all of this, only to get back to "ok sir so let I setup call for remoting to in on the computer ok?"... to once again have them not call or remote in at that designated time. This goes on for weeks until finally you can get them to remote in WHILE you're on the call with them (instead of setting up a time because they will literally never call you back or remote in). Once they remote in... this is when you find out how truly incompetent/computer-illiterate they truly are. I mean they're typing registry editor paths into internet explorer, then windows explorer, etc. before going to a manager to ask how to open the registry editor - all while I'm literally telling them how to do it dozens of times - but they literally act like you don't even exist and won't listen to a single word you say. In addition to that, they're opening stuff like Python thinking it's windows settings (because it has a gear icon), uninstalling my keyboard (???), and doing countless other idiotic moves (I literally lost count). Once they've gone through their little list, they say "ok sir we call you back to the remote in machine at later, ok?"... I begged them to actually call me back this time at the designated time but once again... of course they don't. So it's back to the beginning... calling Dell tech support, they keep literally no records of anything they've done on my machine so it's back through the troubleshooting steps, then back through all the same BS in a remote session, then back to them saying "DERRR IDK WHAT'S WRONG? LET US CALL YOU BACK?"..... this goes on for literally months... and literally (and when I say literally, I'm not joking or exaggerating... I mean LITERALLY) close to 80 hours of phone calls... that's an entire 2 weeks of work days... just on phone calls with Dell tech support. ... I ran out of Characters on this review but bottom line: They took literally months and wasted so much of my time. Dell/Alienware is THE WORST. Avoid at all costs!!!
