My ALienWare experience or Adventure

See the problem with opening the box from underneath is then his wife will go to pick it up to wrap it and the computer will fall out and break.

Does his absence from this thread suggest that he has left the box under his bed and untouched, or that he is now playing with the laptop?

Playing with the laptop, He is too ashamed to visit the forum.

If he is too ashamed to visit the forum, he may be playing with more than that!

Well I made it

Trust me when I say this, it was 8 days of torture for me....

ahhhhhhh











couldn't get a good pic with the cell phone.

Took about the whole afternoon creating back ups disks and loading essential software.

Iago you asked if any bloatware, very minimal. Even thou I asked to not include Steam they went ahead and installed it arghhhh. Software pre-installed AlienAutopsy(restore and back-up software), alienware PC checkpup, Steam, Alienware FX(Christmas light adjuster), Roxio Creator Starter.

What was really nice was all window updates were applied except for December updates. What I don't like Nvidia drivers came outdated, also if one tries to update through the nvidia website it will not install, you will need to get a modified ini file to make it work. And Dell has an updated driver for the GPU I would have thought they would have applied it.

I'm currently stressing the laptop by running the cpu at 100 percent since yesterday, later today I will stress the GPU.

Happy Gaming

Do you like the keyboard?

Yes I like the Keyboard very much, it has a nice quiet solid clicks if that makes sense. I got a blue-screen yesterday while stressing the GPU. I was using nvidia tune.

Trying to replicate today, so far it's doing it's thing. I might have gotten the blue screen, because I didn't re-boot after I installed NvidiaTUne, but I think it shouldn't have mattered.

I have not monkeyed around with the CPU on mine yet. I figure that 3.3ghz should be plenty for now!

It could be defective system memory but on a new system its much more likely to be a bad driver.

I was getting random BSOD's with the omen in game and that's what I ruled it down to. I ended up downgrading from 285.58 to 280.26 and it fixed my problem.

I never thought I would say it but in as much as nvidia still can not get there act together (and we have all been waiting patiently for a while now) the next gpu I buy may very well be an ati. I think I can get more bang for my buck that way anyway and from what I hear ati cards are not space heaters like nvidia's current line up.

Oh and I just got skyrim for Christmas and am rather enjoying it.

I just hit level 61. I am a shameless geek.

Looks like I need to check skyrim out then. Even a old electrician we have on the rig who has had his single core laptop forever went out and got a new laptop with a dedicated card just so he could play skyrim at work. He is a modder from way back. We got talking one day and he was telling me about spending about 700 dollars on 8mb of ram (the single chips) then soldering them piggyback and doubling his ram to 16mb, lol.

RAM has been an issue with Skyrim from the get-go. It is a 32 bit executable but was limited out of the box to using only 2gb of RAM. They just issued a patch last week that allows it to address the full 4gb that a 32 bit program should. That solved most of the crashing issues -- I have not had it crash once since the patch. The game appears to be very CPU-dependent -- it really makes me wish that I could access the other 8gb that my system has!

I thought that 12gb might be overkill when I bought my laptop, but I have been very glad that I did -- especially with applications like Photoshop.

I had the same problem setting up a Minecraft server for my kids. Minecraft loves to eat ram. It has 6gb right now 2/2gb sticks and 2/1gb sticks. I think I may be upgrading to 8gb soon.

That reminds me of when I use to mess around in garrysmod. It took a decent video card and a lot of ram. Ironic now that I have 24gb I don't play garrysmod anymore.

Is Minecraft as 64 bit .exe? It would figure that a deliberately pixillated program like that could address more RAM than Skyrim can!

I think it is a 32 bit program, but recommends you having 32bit and 64 bit java installed. They have some texture packs that make it look very real.

I upgraded all my kids laptops here a few months back. They all had Toughbook CF-28's. 800mhz or 1000mhz Pentium 3 with 512mb of ram. I used a shrunk down version of xp on it and it would play halo ce on low, emulators for NES, Sega, other simple games. I had started looking and working getting them something better and ran across a few models that had a good graphics card in them. Right now my youngest boy and daughter have a toughbook CF-50. Pentium M 1.7 (can be upgraded), 1.5GB RAM and ATI 9600 64mb. My middle boy has a CF-73 with 1.7 Pentium M (non-upgradable), 1.5GB RAM and ATI 9000 64mb, my oldest boy's travel laptop is a Gobook 3 with Pentium M 1.8 (upgradable), 1.25GB RAM(Max is 2GB), ATI 9000 64mb with omega driver, GPS, BLUETOOTH. I have spare CF-50 set up like the others for when they have friends over.

My point was that if it is a 32 bit .exe you are limited to no more than 4gb of your total main memory. I have heard that Minecraft is more than capable of grinding some systems to a halt -- the extra memory would likely help.


More to the point, give us the gaming details on your rig, blur!

Well my experience has been the less then perfect. Yesterday I tried updating the nividia drivers without success. So after reading dell support forums only Dell Nvidia approved drivers will work. Long story short, BF3 freezes immediatly after playing for a couple of seconds or it takes a couple of minutes to lock up. After searching the web I came to realize the nvidia drivers installed were outdated. After numerous unsuccesful installs. I go to dell website and install their approved drivers with out success. So un-installed all drivers and installed the Intel driver well that worked. When I go install their approved nvidia driver it won't let me it reads it does not find my graphic card....aye....


After the dell tech spent over 3 hours this morning trying to load drivers, He re-imaged and now I have the old drivers, but we can not make any changes to activate Nvidia GPU. They just emailed me I have two options get monies back or exchange for a new unit.


fraK...

I had a long 4 day weekend of gaming FRAK...

Well it's going back, wow what an experience.

But dude its a dell!

See? Digital Storm. Told ya!

. . . oops . . .

Well, now we get to see how their customer service works. Leave it to Blur to do a full-featured review!

I respect someone who is thorough.

If he is that willing to take one for the team, though, he really should start clicking on some of ye wigs' links. They can hardly be any more dangerous than any other links Blur clicks on!