Why I will never buy another Alienware

When I first started at Flying Lab almost two years ago, I of course had to give back the Aluminum PowerBook I had been using for my previous job. My personal laptop, an old Titanium PowerBook, was too old to be much use by that point. I decided I wanted to get a new machine. After looking around at gaming laptops (I wanted to be able to do work on the machine), I first ordered one from a small custom shop called CyberPower, which was DOA. After several failed attempts to contact their supposedly "24/7" support line, I finally got a hold of someone there and was able to return the machine for a refund. Burned by that experience, I decided to go with a more well-known manufacturer. That's when I turned to Alienware.

I bought an SLI-enabled Alienware Aurora m9700 laptop, which ran fine for a normal machine, but certainly didn't perform the way a "gaming" machine should perform. It's been plagued by troubles ever since.
Actual problems I've had with the machine itself:

• Low framerates and unplayable choppiness in World of Warcraft (certainly not the most graphically intensive game on the market) and Half-Life 2 (released 2 years before this machine was new and supposedly top of the line). These games should run silky-smooth on this machine. I suspect the wifi card has something to do with the choppy framerate in WoW, as it happens more often when playing over a wireless connection.
• The machine has had two sticks of RAM die since I bought it. To be fair, Alienware support was pretty good about diagnosing the problem and sending replacements, at least.
• Often instead of going into sleep mode, the machine will freeze with the fans and drives still spinning but the screen off.
• The machine currently locks up after about 30-50 minutes of playing WoW on very low graphics settings. I'm currently down a stick of RAM (see above), so I'm going to withhold judgement until I replace it. WoW should still run just fine on this machine with only 1GB of RAM, though.
• [UPDATED:] While idle, the machine runs at about 30-60% cpu utilization, with spikes to 100% that occasionally lock up the machine. Process Explorer lists this as coming from DPCs, or Deferred Procedure Calls from drivers. This seems to point to a piece of hardware that's not interacting well with its driver.

Problems I've had with Alienware, and the design of the machine in general:

• The drivers for the AMD Turion mobile CPU just aren't cut out for a gaming machine. The CPU goes into "power save" mode during gameplay, reducing it to about 800MHz.
• Alienware charged me $25 when I bought the machine for a set of "Respawn" recovery DVDs that would restore the machine to its factory state. These DVDs turned out to actually just be coasters. Alienware did refund me the $25, but not until a year later is when I needed the DVDs and discovered they were bad. Even just a little testing would have caught this earlier and allowed them to re-create the DVDs. Instead I spent a day re-installing the OS and finding, downloading and installing the right drivers and utilities.
• Alienware also charged me to install a tech-support utility called "Alien Autopsy" that would record information about my current system state to aid in troubleshooting or support calls. This utility was installed in a broken state until I got a replacement copy from Alienware tech support. Not a huge deal, but again, something just a little testing could have prevented.
• When I ordered the machine, I also selected two games to add to my order. The games never arrived, with no explanation as to why. When I called Alienware about it, they explained that the reason was that the games were out of stock, and wouldn't be restocked. They offered me a $50 gift certificate to Amazon as a replacement, so that I could buy those games from Amazon instead. Since I paid less than $50 for the games, I agreed. However, the gift certificate never arrived, and when I called again about it, Alienware claimed it would be sent soon, as they batched up such emails to be sent together. I've since lost the incident number, and never got the Amazon credit.

I can't justify getting another computer so soon after spending as much as I did on this machine, but I really hate not being happy with my computer. So I've resolved that once I get my replacement RAM (so that I can rule it out as a problem), I'm going to keep calling Alienware support to make sure that all my issues are resolved. Hopefully it doesn't take me hours and hours of tech support phone calls.