I’m currently working on a customers m5500i-R3 series and I can tell you from firsthand experience it’s overpriced JUNK!

There is absolutely no way I’d ever even consider paying 1/3 the price for what Alienware charges for these things after seeing the design factor and the fact there is no way the design allows for even moderate cooling capabilities let alone gaming or video usage cooling (which by the way the proudly use as a selling point).

Quite honestly if I were advising someone on buying a laptop I would stake my reputation on NOT getting an Alienware laptop, regardless of the cost!!!

I had to take a moment and post this information after reading the thread here about the Alienware laptops overheating. My step son came to me last year with his Alienware Area-51m ( I believe that is right model, but not sure), completely bummed out because it kept overheating and shutting down after a short time of game play. He spent hours on the phone with Alienware, and wrote numerous e-mails and was pretty much just given the run-around for a month. It was hard watching him go through all this considering how anti-climatic it was for him thinking he had purchased one f the top-of-the-line laptops only to find he cannot use it. It was devastating for him to say the least. One of the computer technicians he spoke with had suggested that maybe the CPU fan was not functioning properly, so they purchased a new fan, which didn’t happen until after about a year of not being able to use his Alienware. Given the fact that Alienware commonly combined cooling pads to help with the heat issue it would appear that they have been aware, to some degree, of the overheating problem for some time. So here were are over a year later when he brings this issue to me, along with a new CPU fan/heat sink assembly and asked me if I could swap it out for him. I have personally built over 30 gaming PCs and completed hundreds of small upgrades on laptops, i.e. memory, HDD, replaced parts, etc. I decided to make it a learning lesson for him and we changed the fan together. This is where it gets interesting, because I didn’t expect to see what I saw when we cracked open the laptop and removed the existing CPU fan. I fully believe that what we found has caused hundreds if not thousands of Alienware customers to experience frustration and unnecessary expense. I wanted to inspect the old fan and see if I could identify any abnormalities. That’s when I noticed, that on the old heat sink of the fan, where it comes in contact with the CPU, someone at the Alienware factory had forgotten to remove the foil from the face of the heat sink prior to installing on the CPU. It also appeared that they used no additional thermal grease outside of the foil cover either. Once we PROPERLY installed the new CPU fan, and reloaded the OS we have had no problems with the laptop besides the keyboard randomly stops responding properly, ( L becomes 3 while typing something), but that’s another issue altogether, which I believe was tied to a dead CMOS battery. Well I hope this information was helpful, and it would be nice if Alienware stood behind their products and replaced the laptops that may have been damaged do to overheating, because of an assembly line mistake. The chipset on this laptop is having issues since the overheating and has not worked properly since, and since this isn’t the end users fault, the manufacturer should replace them to avoid a class action lawsuit. Who wants to shell out close to $4,000 for a machine Alienware can’t seem to engineer or manufacture properly?
If you have had the same issue, send me an e-mail so we can include you on our list of customers who have purchased a faulty Alienware laptop. I have an appointment with an attorney who specializes in such cases who might be interested in speaking with you. My e-mail is equitable1@yahoo.com, my name is Damian. Thank you for the opportunity to share this information with others in our cyber community, and I hope it was helpful and I hope Alienware opts for customer satisfaction over company profits. I will keep you posted.

Thanks