Last Wednesday (April 30) I noticed that SLI on my on-month old Alienware 18 (770M version) wasn't working any more. Both video cards were showing up in the device manager and everywhere else, and only PhysX settings were available in NVIDIA settings - SLI was gone. So, I did all the usual tests/diagnostics - uninstalled, cleaned and reinstalled the NVIDIA drivers (tried several versions), switched back and forth to Intel graphics mode, and all the usual other stuff. No joy.
So I bit the bullet, nuked the hard drive and reinstalled Windows from scratch. Same result - the machine was working perfectly but no SLI. I concluded that this was a hardware issue, so I called Alienware tech support, and the agent immediately agreed that I had done all possible diagnostic tests already and that hardware was almost certainly to blame. So he arranged for a tech to come Friday (May 2).
I also mentioned that I'm not too happy at the rubber coating peeling from the corners of the palmrest and the screen bezel, despite the machine only being a month old and only transported a few times, and in the 18-inch Alienware backpack at that! He agreed to get the tech to change these out too.
He duly came on Friday, and got to work swapping out the video cards and SLI cable. On rebooting, the machine refused to POST and beeped 7 times, indicating CPU trouble. He disassembled it again, checked everything thoroughly and rebooted. Still seven beeps.
Luckily he had been dispatched a spare motherboard, so after changing that out (which was a nightmare due to a stuck screw on the audio daughterboard (nice job, Dell factory!), he fires it up again. No POST and two beeps this time - no RAM detected. He disassembled it again several times, changing the the RAM sticks from slot to slot. Still no POST and two beeps.
He got onto the Dell techs by phone. The guy he got was utterly clueless. After having heard the problem, the procedures taken and the state of the machine, the tech on the phone asked such questions as "Have you run diagnostics?" and "have you reseated the RAM?" Clearly just a non-tech with a list of stock questions in front of him and zero knowledge.
After a lot of holding on the phone, the tech in my home was instructed to give up and I was told by the phone agent that a box would come today for me to dispatch the machine to the service center, and it would be away for a week! I'm a graphic designer and use this machine for work, I'm self employed and don't have a backup that's realistically useable. Disaster!
Naturally, I'm not happy, and for several reasons. One, I paid a lot of money for this machine and don't expect ANYTHING to break. Two, having a tech turn an essentially fully-functional machine into a twelve-pound doorstop that just beeps at me is unreal. Three, having so-called "experts" on the phone that know less than we do and have no advice or troubleshooting procedures to offer up is ridiculous! And four, just giving up on the repair and shipping the machine back means my primary professional tool is out of action for a week!
I've now read on this forum several posts with experiences that seem suspiciously similar to mine in terms of hardware changes causing such symptoms and error codes, due to the <profanity> way the Alienware 18 BIOS is set up. I've also read that repairs don't always work. Considering that the computer already got a new motherboard and GPUS, how can I be sure any repair will work for me? I really think I ought to get a replacement machine. I don't trust this one any more given the amount of work done on it already that failed utterly, and after Friday's massive <profanity> I trust Dell's ability to fix it properly even less!
Can anyone shed any light on how I should play this, given that I don't seem to be the only one with these kinds of issues? If something similar happened to you, was it resolved? Going without my machine this week I can just about take financially, but a long-drawn out process of fix-break-return-fix-break-return will put me under!
Thank you for reading!