I purchased an Alienware Area-51 Desktop computer on April 14, 2011 with a next day on-site service contract. In under a year's time, the computer has had to have service calls on THREE occasions.
In the latest component failure, I called into Alienware's (Dell's) tech support line on April 3 to report dead USB ports as well as an optical drive that was malfunctioning and locking up the system when blank disks were inserted. It is now April 18, and the items have not been repaired.
Alienware uses a company called Unisys to perform its on location repair jobs. On three occasions, Unisys did not confirm a service appointment, but simply set up a time without confirming if anybody was going to be home. It is commonplace that Unisys calls a mere 30 minutes before they are do to show up for a service appoint we were never notified about. As a result of not knowing about the appointment, nobody was here to let the repair tech in.
We are now going on 15 DAYS with a computer with a dead optical drive and Alienware has ignored rectifying the problem.