Alienware M17x is the worst laptop I’ve ever used. And I’ve used many since the first Dell laptop I bought in 1999.
The ergonomics are really bad. Sharp corners in design make your wrists shout in pain after any extented usage. And the weight of 15lbs/7kg or something like that doesn’t exactly temp to carry it around.
The drivers/bios/whatever are buggy. My Alienware M17x used to get “stuck” all the time for minutes. Downgrading bios helped, but there are still occasional problems with crashes etc. Now, for example, as I’m writing this, I have the windows task manager crashed on my background. Or actually it’s not crashed but it does not receive any input. I’ve never seen that happen on any other laptop or desktop. And this is just an example.
AC power adapter died already once after a month of use, the laptop started reporting that not enough power is available. Now I have a replacement which works.
Crappy wireless adapter. In the same room where cheapo HP laptop gets II wlan bars, Alienware struggles to get I and often drops the connection. This has been repeatedly verified in different connections so I have no doubts about this observation. Also, sometimes the wlan adapter/driver just dies and you have to reboot the laptop to enable it.
VGA output to projector? This is by far the worst design I’ve ever seen: If you use the laptop even ONCE without the power adapter, the laptop will automatically disable hybrid graphics, which in turn makes it impossible to enable video projector output! To re-enable it, you need reboot, go to BIOS settings, reboot, and then enable the video output. I couldn’t believe this before I heard this is “known issue”. Unbelievable.
Want to hear the worst news? I didn’t even consider the price tag when writing this review, since I didn’t pay anything for mine (got it through work). If I would have had to pay $2000 or whatever obscene the price is then this review would have been far more negative.
Of course the laptop is fast etc., but this is not the only fast laptop in the market, so I’d definitely skip this one without a second thought.