Problem with mah pee-see

MVMosin

I've got this nice Alienware laptop that's been sitting in my closet collecting dust for the past six months. Why? Because the hard drive randomly died four months after I bought it, and apparently the warranty was voided when I put in some more RAM.

I finally decided to pull aside some money from my, as they say in the vernacular, "ghetto" revolution machine's budget, and buy a new hard drive. (I doubt the cause will miss fifty bucks very much.)

One problem. I don't have the system restore disk because I recently moved. I was sure to put my games and what-not in my bags so the movers wouldn't pack them, but you know what they did? They packed my Goddammned bags.

When I got to the storage unit, I found all the boxes stacked nicely, in the middle of the unit, in a cube. That's right, a Goddamned cube. Sure is nice and tidy, guys. Sure saved a lot of space by stacking everything on top of something else (I'm sure I'll need the other half of the storage unit to store all the stuff I don't have?). Now, how do I find all my shit? Nevermind. Screw the movers. Let them pile onto their short bus with the satisfaction of a job well half-assed.

I installed Windows onto the laptop, figuring I could just start from there without the system restore disk. Unfortunately, I had forgotten about all the gaming gizmos an Alienware has in it. Well, no, I didn't. That's why I wanted it running. What I actually forgot was that these things need drivers. Drivers that Windows does not include.

Again, no problem, right? I'll just get on the cybernetic bullhorn and flag myself down a few of those drivers. WRONG. My network card also needs a driver.

So, AGAIN, I figure this is a problem easily worked around. I'll download the driver for that on to a disk via another computer and then install it on my laptop. Well, the thing is, I wouldn't know what driver to install, because, being the genius I am, I made it a very low priority to memorise the list of doohickys inside my computer. Windows can't identify the network adapter because it has no relevant software on the hard drive, and in order to identify it, it needs to connect to the internet.

So, I put myself at the mercy of the on-line gaming community. Spare me the several hours of sorting through that sweaty storage unit, painstakingly searching every box which the movers painstakingly didn't label.

In short: throw me a bone. What can I do?

Oh, and, to eliminate a few possible answers:

1. The hard copy of the computer information is in the same place the system restore disk is.

2. The network adapter for my computer model was originally a wireless one, but I got another one because I have no wireless router. This means I can't check the specs on the Alienware website.

imbalanced

What Alienware laptop do you have? Oh and I had one of those stupid hunks of shit when they first start making them, and I regret it to the day. They're overpriced, overheat EVEN with one of those cooling pads below them, their components die several times within the first year, the customer support is SHIT, when you say there's a hardware issue with your laptop, they will keep your laptop for a month or two and then send it back with a wiped hard drive and the power management settings turned on....

Seriously, I would just junk the laptop and get something more reliable. I've got a Fujitsu Lifebook now and it's 100% better than the Alienware. Usually there's only two or three types of wireless/network adapter drivers to choose from, I would download them all from Alienware's website and just try installing all of them. Eventually one will go through.

To highlight MY experience with Alienware, my laptop went through two hard drives, two batteries as they lost their charge, the wireless card burned out so I had to buy an express card one to replace it, the laptop could only be turned on for 45 minutes before it would overheat and completely shut down. When I told Alienware this and sent it in to them to GET A NEW BATTERY, they completely wiped my system with no option for backing up my information, even though the hard drive wasn't even the problem. I lived on customer support, and by the first year the laptop was no longer usable.

whuppins

When you say you "got another one" (NIC), do you mean you customized your laptop to ship with a different model, or you actually bought a third-party NIC and installed it yourself after the fact?

MVMosin

imbalanced wrote: »

What Alienware laptop do you have? Oh and I had one of those stupid hunks of shit when they first start making them, and I regret it to the day. They're overpriced, overheat EVEN with one of those cooling pads below them, their components die several times within the first year, the customer support is SHIT, when you say there's a hardware issue with your laptop, they will keep your laptop for a month or two and then send it back with a wiped hard drive and the power management settings turned on....

Seriously, I would just junk the laptop and get something more reliable. I've got a Fujitsu Lifebook now and it's 100% better than the Alienware. Usually there's only two or three types of wireless/network adapter drivers to choose from, I would download them all from Alienware's website and just try installing all of them. Eventually one will go through.

I would love to get something more reliable, but I can't really afford it. If I have any money left over at the end of the month, it's $100 to $200 at the most. The laptop I have now was a gift. It's an Area-51 5500 or something like that, that's just off the top of my head.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try their website, but like you said, the customer service is shit, and the website itself is pretty much impenetrable. Like, Fort Knox vault style. Like, Vault 13 style.

...Not that Vault 13 was particularly hard to get into. But for the purposes of the plot, it was.

Edit: the laptop was a gift. When I realised I needed a driver for the network adapter, I called the person that gave it to me and asked what kind I needed, and he first told me to check the website, but then took that back, saying that he had the network adapter switched when he ordered it, for the above-listed reason.

And I must say, Whuppins, grammatical vigilance FTW.

Edit again: I tried Alienware's site. Unfortunately, in order to access the driver downloads, I have to have some account number from my purchase information, which would be in the folder along with the system restore disk. Fuck.