Alienware Forums

The Alienware forums are pretty worthless in my opinion. It's mostly just people griping about how awful Alienware is with almost no useful content from other owners. Occasionally Alienware employees will try to offer assistance but it's usually pretty basic stuff like "reboot" or "make sure all your cables are connected". I bought an Area51 from them before I got my m17x which is why I still have my account. Nothing from my m17x purchase appears on the actual Alieware site. Even driver links for m17x and m15x redirect to Dell.

I tried asking if there was anything about my purchase that would appear on the actual Alienware site but never got an answer. From poking around it seems pretty clear to me that m17x and m15x (and presumably any other models that Alieware farms out to Dell) will go strictly through the Dell site. Quite frankly I don't think you're missing out on much.

spoke with an ALienware tech support today who basically confirmed what you say: ALienware has focused on providing prompt and really responsive tech support by phone and is letting the forum, update and website stuff default to Dell's existing media, such as this one.

Seems like a good plan: we just have to carve out some space here on the forum for an ALienware group and we are up and running.

This is the very same confusion I am having. Why,if you purchase an Alienware/Dell you are not entitled to the support on the Alienware site?. Is my Aurora a Dell or Alienware pc?.. One other problem is that when I type the service tag on the Dell Replacement Spare Parts and Upgrades it does not recognize it? Software and Peripherals does the same thing..I get and error msg when using Dell system analyzer..  About the only thing the Dell site recognizes is  my one year warranty.

well I guess my take is that as long as there is still both on-line and phone support we are ok -- the main issue is when the system fails to recognize your legitimate numbers, customer and/or order number or tag number.  Took as few days but the Dell site did finally catch up with my account information and has fill description now for my system and the various account, customer and tag numbers -- hopefully this has caught up in your case also.

I ran into this problem today as well.  I wanted to let someone at Alienware know--I mean the actual SOFTWARE writers--that a whole bunch of antivirus software is naming one of their files as a trojan.  From what I can see on the internet, this has been going on for quite a while now, and I've seen forum posts by some fellow who claims to be an Alienware rep (and yet never provides more than a first name and an initial) and he claims the file is legit.  So if there is some way to contact Alienware directly and get this nuisance taken care of once and for all, that would be great.  The file is C:\Windows\Syswow64\OEM\oscust.exe and McAfee insists it is infected.  I can no longer check the original creation date because every time I restore it from McAfee's quarantine, it changes the creation date and time to when it was restored.  16/41 scanners at virustotal do not like this file, but I would like someone at Alienware to check the MD5 hash number and confirm whether or not it is clean.  Prevx is reviewing it but pretty much seems to think it IS OK, and that is from a link at the virustotal site.  For now, next time McAfee tags it, I'll let it stay in quarantine, as one of the other forum members here said he has done so for a month with no noticeable problems.  Still, I think Alienware needs to be aware of this, and in my opinion it is extremely poor of them to not even have an e-mail link on their website.  I stayed on hold for quite a while this evening on the telephone before I gave up.  (Actually, the purpose of my call was to ask them how on earth one is supposed to register at their site if they won't accept the one and only account number we have (from Dell) as valid...And of course also no e-mail available for Dell tech support, nor is the chat service available either from the Dell.ca site...  Well, the McAfee chat went well, but she said I had to submit a "complaint" to Avert, so I uploaded the file, but no medium for me to suggest it was a false positive.  I think they need convincing by the Alienware folks themselves, not from me.

End of rant.   Just wanted to contact the actual Alienware creators themselves.  I mean, isn't Dell just a reseller?

Update...I just spoke to someone at Alienware tech support.  Re support, like drivers and such, we can get those at the Dell site.  If I understood him correctly, in the future our Dell service tag number will work at the Alienware site.  When I tried it last night, however, it did not.  I wanted to see what, if anything, the Alienware forum members might be saying about the issue I mentioned in my previous post.

I've written a post on another thread re the trojan thing, so if anyone is interested, with the way I titled it, it's easy to find. ;) 

It took me an hour of being on hold to reach someone at Alienware, so my advice would be to go through Dell, maybe that would be faster.  And maybe the chat, I don't know.  (I tried the Dell chat last night and it was not available, so I don't know if they have limited hours or what was going on there.)

I just wanted to post my dealings with tech support and the forums/support of newer alienware products. I was informed by the tech I talked to over the phone that at least for now and the forseable future ONLY legacy systems will be supported by the alienware site. All the newer systems with have to use the Dell site. I read an earlier post that said they are changing this in the future. I'm absolutely not saying that post is wrong, but I was not told of that in my dealings with tech support. I hope that they do make changes and we can use the Alienware site. If not then I hope that this section of the forum grows because in its current state I dont even bother to ask for help here. There is not many of us here yet and NO ONE from dell or alienware answers these posts :(  If you game, try posting on the games forums, as i do with WOW. Large pool of knowledge to pull from and the admins answer technical probelms very quickly.

Hm, OK.  I was told that in the "future" we would be able to use our Dell tag as an account number at the Alienware site.  I wanted to read the Alienware forums because I thought there would be more information there about the issue I was experiencing, but I was unable to access the forums.

On the night of Nov 8th, I actually phoned Dell tech support and by the time I got through to a tech (and it didn't take long at all, unlike my hour long wait on hold with Alienware using the phone number posted on the Alienware website), I was told by that tech that I was talking to Alienware. 

Now I'm going to get on a bit of a soap box here, because it does appear that one gets contradictory information from these two venues.  For example, Alienware tells me that my Dell tag number will, at a later time, work on their site.  You are told the opposite.

And re the file I was phoning about, I am told by a tech at Alienware that it IS an Alienware file and not a trojan and it's clean, not to worry, and then I am told the EXACT polar opposite by a tech who also says he's from Alienware but whom I reach through Dell.  The consequences of this sort of thing can be extremely serious, depending on the issue.  In the case of a 'trojan' file, where one tech says it's theirs and clean and another says it's not theirs and is a trojan--you can have such consequences as identity theft and financial theft...Or your mega-expensive gaming system can be ruined by the loss of a critical system file.  I would like the Alienware staff to get it together and come to a consistent decision here and then officially post that information.  This issue is well over a year old and has never been properly addressed. I mean, I certainly can't be the only person saying, "Hey, would the actual creators of this file just FIX this already? So that their customers stop getting confusing and contradictory information?"

See this thread, which got moved to the virus section of this forum (and while I see why the moderators did that, I still think it is absolutely CRITICAL that official Alienware staff see this and rectify it because this is super, super massively BAD.)

http://en.community.dell.com/forums/p/19303113/19584242.aspx#19584242

Ah, "tech support"...not always easy.  My question could have been easily answered had I had access to a large pool of owners of Alienware systems--namely, "Do you all have file 'such and such' on your computers?  Was it preinstalled, and what are its properties?"  I did get an answer from one person here and I appreciate the response, but it does seem that, as you say, there are not a lot of people here.