A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Just when I thought I had the ultimate water-cooled machine, now we have water cooled ram — OCZ Releases Water-Cooled RAM — and I am behind once again.

Demystifying Display Connectors — some stuff in here I didn’t know about HDMI, DVI, UDI, Displayport, etc.

The Gadgets Weblog: Lightsnake, the Soundcard in a Cable — is this cool or what? awesome. the idea is brilliant.

Finally resolved my Alienware issues. Full refund. Took too much of my time complaining but at the end of the day, I will give Alienware credit for making it right.

UPDATE 11/6/06: I’ll leave the original entry below for history but Alienware finally worked this out with me. I received a full refund. So at the end of the day they were reasonable. I have to credit Amex with assistance, I am sure that raising a dispute via them helped to resolve things. Original entry follows.

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Why? Because I ordered an Alienware box in July, it arrived broken in August, and it is now October and I have yet to see the fixed box returned to me. I have moved on to trying to get my money back. I have contacted support via phone and email so many times I’ve lost count, and all I get is handwaving.

• Alienware Sucks! — the classic with a complete guide to providing pressure on recalcitrant merchants. Even merits a small WIkipedia mention
• Another guy who managed to get a refund
• some guy has created a t-shirt immortalizing the sentiment
• another set of gripes
• plenty of forum posts about unhappy alienware users — for instance, or here
• Reseller ratings which shows a lot of dissatisfaction, and dropping overall scores

Personally I am contacting American Express in an attempt to get my money back, I am sending mail to Alienware daily. I’ve given up on phone support as you will a) spend a lot of time on hold, b) have to reeducate someone new each day (Groundhog Day), and c) learn that they don’t know what is going on and can’t find anyone to help you.

As i previously mentioned, my widowpc gaming computer has been acting up — it has always had thermal issues, and their support has been weak. I finally ripped open the box and figured out exactly how the liquid cooling system worked, forced some bubbles out of the system and probably broke up some vapor lock in the pump. WidowPC shipped no doc with the system and their support staff doesn’t really know what it is in my box, so I can’t recommend them highly.

I was hoping Alienware: High-Performance Systems – Notebooks, Desktop PCs, Workstations, Peripherals would be better, given their Dell ownership and longer tenure in the market. My new alienware arrived yesterday and ominously, the shipping box had a big gash in it — the shipping materials were very flimsy.  The front of the case was marred in several spots and when I turned the unit on, it sounded like an Oster Blender. Not Good.

I took a bunch of pictures of the shipping box and the PC and emailed them to Alienware last night. Response email this morning directed me to call in. So call I did. I had to walk three different people (none of them native English speakers) through problem and all the pictures. The last guy wanted me to open the case and figure out exactly what component was grinding itself into bits. This was 45 minutes into the call, I refused. I paid top dollar for a machine that was broken out of the box, and I paid for 3 years of onsite support — I didn’t realize I was the onsite support. He backed down and agreed to take the machine back, it took more than an hour to finally get receive an RMA and Fedex label — nearly two hours total. Everyone was nice but this is crazy, way too much time. So I can’t say I am thrilled with Alienware so far.

I bounce back and forth between building my own machines/providing my own frontline support, and buying retail and demanding retail support. My time is constrained right now and so I fired myself as an assembly/support person and have gone back to retail. But this is no fun.

Rich got me excited about rebates and deals on technology — Tong Family Blog: Current Canon Rebates — great deals on Canon cameras. I did a quick search because i need a new printer for HP Rebates and wow there are a lot of offers out there — HP Rebate Gateway
, HP Hot Deals, HP Web Deals (Is this an official HP site?). Oh I might need a new TIVO too and so I found the Tivo Rebate center. I suspect if I cataloged all the hardware and software on my home network and methodically looked for logical deals and upgrade offers, I would find a lot of great offers. And then there are all the local retailer deals. It is inconvenient to sort thru all this, I really need an automagic way to harvest all the deals I am likely to be interested in.

DIY Software from PC Magazine: Your Virtual Assistant — good article on deploying asterisk for a small business. I want to throw out the phone system at my house and put in an asterisk-based system, good tips in here, but I don’t have the time to do this and don’t want to be front line of support for the family. I really need a local asterisk var…

Getting ready to switch from a WidowPC box to an Alienware box. I’ve had the WidowPC box 8 months, it is a nice SLI liquid-cooled box, but it has had thermal problems from the day I got it and no longer runs. WidowPC is honestly not that responsive. I think they are just too small — my order number suggests I am approximately customer number 1000, and my support requests suggests they have handled ~4000 support requests — not large numbers, and too many requests per box.

Alienware offers onsite service and for the kind of bleeding edge boxes I buy, I think that is worthwhile. I just don’t have the time to be front line of support for myself, like Bob is for himself.

Bob building his new PC — like me he is driven by gaming performance. His woes at fry’s — http://www.bobsplanet.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/72-Frys-Slimy-Practices-the-Bobsplanet-PC-project-continues.html — personally I have given up on Fry’s, they have acres of stuff but never the exact part I need.

jkOnTheRun: Sandisk 1GB SD card down to $29 starting tomorrow — amazing.