The Alienware should be a work of art, and there is nothing wrong
with having one - I guess I'm objecting to the degree of
gouging involved here. At least now you know that if the
machine doesn't work well, it is backed up by a £700
investment in service.
The sad part is that apparently the motherboard in my old
system (a K8V) was defective all along, but I didnt really know
it because it apparently worked fine all along, and the only problems
it displayed were with a couple applications that wouldnt run on it.
These being Iolo's System Mechanic's 'System Shield', and Panda
Internet Security. Both of these applications worked perfectly
BEFORE I installed the K8V, and I assumed it was just some
incompatibilty between the board (or the 64 Bit CPU) and
these applications, even tho both Panda and Iolo said there
wasnt an incompatibility issue.
Other than getting frequent hard drive errors (requiring running
a chkdsk) , the system ran perfectly for the 2 years it was installed,
and I always got very high benchmarking scores from PCPITSTOP,
3dMark 2003 and 2005, and Sisoft Sandra and a couple other
benchmark utils.
It had 4 hard drives, 2 IDE and 2 Sata. Initially, the 2 sata's were
installed in a non-raid set up. 3 months ago, all of a sudden the
system gave me errors on hard disk, every day, with every boot.
and reporting some corruption on either both, or one of the Sata
disks. This was every day, so I switched the two Sata's to a JBOD
array, and all of a sudden, NO errors of any kind in Event Viewer.
Until bam, the whole system went a couple weeks ago, would not
even boot. (would power up, then the display would go blank regardless
of what if anything the system was doing at the time), Shortly thereafter,
you couldnt even boot it with the Windows cd ... (Would always give an
error about ntfs.sys, OR atapi.sys, OR config.sys missing).
General consenses was either the motherboard or the powersupply
went. Because of above issues, and my very deep trust of
Antec Power supplies, I assume it was the motherboard.
Pity, it was the first system I ever built. Had 2 gig ram, 2 dvdrw's,
an AMD 3400 Cpu, the 4 hard drives, an Antec Tru Power 550 watt
power supply, 5 cooling fans and seemed to run very well. (unless I screwed
up
the mobo during the install) I was pretty proud of myself. Everything
was in, and seemed to be working fine (even tho it I will admit, looked
like a spaghetti factory inside it) I patted myself on the back and
figured not bad for a guy with a case of the 'shakes'!!!!!
So this time, I said to hell with it, I am gonna just buy exactly
what I want ....... I'll put the two dvdrw's and two of the harddrives
into it, and everything else will be newly assembled at the factory.
