[akots]

Same thing for HP, warranty is not covering anything apart from defects in parts. And it is not world wide, cannot fix anywhere, only in the US. Have to pay for shipping as well at least one way and insurance. A friend of mine had to pay $60 to ship an HP laptop from Houston to a Houston-area factory for changing broken DVD drive which can be bought on ebay for $45 and replaced within 2 minutes, don't even need a screwdriver for that. Yet "official" listed HP price for that drive was around $300. The laptop itself was under $700.

The main thing that concerns me with Alienware is reported poor display quality (low to medium contrast) and Dell's very average reliability. Even if there is a known and acknowledged defect with their machines, they are not obliged to fix it and are certainly not even trying. We have a group of a dozen Vostro 200 bought as a bulk for students and none of them can read or write DVDs despite having a DVD burner. They do read/write CDs just fine. The defect was recorded by Dell's technician and put on hold. Still there after a year and a half. Two machines had defective hard drives and one had defective motherboard. Must admit, these were promptly replaced. Not within 24 hours like the warranty says but within about a week. They did not have the parts in stock and small print says that if that is the case, they have more time to fix the defects.