Alienware Refusing Customers As Thieves

ChrisPaget writes "Thinking about buying Alienware (now owned by Dell)? Think again. After buying an almost-new Alienware laptop on eBay, I've spent the last week trying to get hold of a Smart Bay caddy to connect a second hard drive (about $150 for $5 of bent metal). Four different Alienware teams have refused to even give me a price on this accessory, instead accusing me of stealing the machine since I didn't buy it directly from their eBay store. They want me to persuade the eBay seller I did buy it from to add me as an authorized user of his Alienware account — they have no concept of 'ownership transfer' and instead assume that if you're not in their system, you must be a thief."

Comments

no honor among thieves

[slashdime]

With Alienware's prices, I often wonder who is the thief.

Re:no honor among thieves

[machine321]

when they're first turned on, they just boot Windows.

So, you're saying they shipped it to you broken?

Re:no honor among thieves

[Gooba42]

Roughly 2004ish I bought what was on paper a very nice Alienware desktop.

While I waited, my machine bounced around their eleventy bajillion phases of testing and building and installing, etc. seemingly at random for about 2 months. When the machine arrived, it still hadn't hit "shipped" status on their site.

When it arrived, I opened the box and plugged everything in and SLI didn't work... I investigated and found that the SLI bridge wasn't seated properly. I fixed that and everything was okay for a couple days.

Then I discovered that I was getting corruption on the hard drive and things weren't working *quite* right on the RAID. After poking around I found it'd been configured slightly wrong. Being a power user I wasn't really worried, I'd paid for them to image my hard drive and a restore after configuring it right couldn't be *that* hard...

Then I discovered that my restore disc was completely blank. The only way Alienware was willing to help me was if I shipped it at my expense to their service center to be reimaged. (Reimage WHAT exactly? The RAID was hosed, there wasn't anything to reimage!) Relatively minor setback but I can install Windows, I just didn't want to...

So I installed Windows and discovered my driver disc was completely blank as well. I used my wife's machine and managed to get online to download drivers from their website. After rebooting an ungodly number of times, downloading for seemingly forever and putting together my own backups, the machine finally worked properly.

The parts would have been far cheaper at NewEgg but I was flush with cash from my mother's life insurance and wanted to have a flawless machine I didn't have to build and troubleshoot myself. The same machine was twice as expensive from Falcon Northwest and parts availability was an issue so I went to Alienware. This didn't work out. In the end, Alienware offered me the amazingly unhelpful option of shipping it back at my own expense and being refunded most of my money, the 30% restocking fee still applies when they manage to fuck up the machine before shipping it untested.

Fast forward 2 years and my Windows restore/install disk doesn't work for reasons which are vague and stupid. I installed Linux and various WINE implementations and it does what I want it to do, runs faster and more solidly than it did out of the box.

Re:Simple Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't you supposed to say something about "sheeple"?

Other than that, welcome back; we missed you.

Re:Alienware

[Anonymous Coward]

More like the Extenz of pre-built PC's.

Re:Alienware are overpriced anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

You act like all of that stuff is difficult, you must work for Geek Squad?

Re:Alienware

[windsurfer619]

I thought that was Apple.

Goodbye karma!

Re:Cars

[Anonymous Coward]

Used computers are never good value for money. They depreciate in value so fast, that you can almost always get a better one new for the price of the used one.

Re:Cars

[Threni]

> Where did the companies of today get the stupid idea that they can do good business by treating customers and potential customers like crap?

Perhaps they've been studying software companies.

Re:Cars

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I think it's a case of Chris being an idiot and Slashdot demonstrating, once again, a complete lack of quality content.

Seconded. Random rants on customer service? Hardly seems the place for it...

Re:No shirt, no shoes, no service

[plover]

Whoever dies with the most kids wins!

Regarding your sig, do you mean that in the "parent" sense or in the "school bus driver at a train crossing" sense? :-)

Re:Cars

[LaskoVortex]

Another totally irrelevant car analogy. WTF is it with people here that they can't think about anything -- software, laptops, relationships -- unless they can put it "in the automotive world"?

You got me. I don't understand it either. Most of these guys who make these stupid automotive comparisons are like confused idiots driving around and totally lost. I guess they think they can get a lot of mileage out of car analogies. But if you ask me, they are running on empty.

Re:Cars

[Omnifarious]

I notice that law mentions motor vehicles, but not computers. I fail to understand its relevance to this discussion. Was this computer extremely heavily modded or something so it fell under this law?

Re:Alienware just has horrible CS overall

[Blakey Rat]

Oh man you Germans! You're so much better than us Americans! There's nothing I love more than to log on to Slashdot and see tons of posts from Europeans telling us how shitty we are! Especially ignorant ones!

See, we have debit cards in the US. You can issue a chargeback to your debit card provider if you get delivered a defective product. There's also no particular requirement to ship the item back, although if you're not an ass you'd call up the retailer and ask about it.

There's no 15 day limit, but I think it depends on the bank. (It can be long if you can demonstrate identity theft; when I found my card was being used by some scammer, and started looking closely at my statements, I found fraudulent charges from 2 months before. My bank refunded those, no questions asked.)

We generally do not have Collect On Delivery (COD) anymore, although you can still find a few catalog shops that offer it. Why? I think it's generally because people in the US usually aren't home when packages are delivered. We have these things called "jobs." (And if you get the package delivered to your workplace, the receptionist there isn't authorized to pay for you, and the delivery guy would probably get pissed waiting around 15 minutes for you to get up to the reception desk.)

Stuff like getting in trouble because you want it delivered where you work, because you can't be at home in work hours, is a total non-problem here.

It's a total non-problem in the US. I get stuff delivered to my workplace all the time, and I've never had my workplace address added to my debit card "approved address" list. Contrary to what the parent was saying, most retails *don't* check the approved address list on your card, or at least not for smaller purchases. Dell/Alienware is unique on that one. I get orders from Amazon, Newegg, GoGamer, tons of places, shipped to work, never had a problem.

I wonder how one could make this better in the USA too. I guess other than opening a new bank, offering new methods and technologies, and paying huge sums for being protected from other banks and the government crushing you because you do so, it's pretty much impossible. :(
But hey, one can always move to another country. :)

Please come save us, Europeans! We're so weak and fragile on our own!

Re:Cars

[mog007]

WTF is it with people here that they can't think about anything -- software, laptops, relationships -- unless they can put it "in the automotive world"?

Well, analogies are like cars...