Alienware M17x owners complaining of 'skipping, stuttering audio,' with no fix in sight (updated: fix in sight!)
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted November 17th 2009 4:11PM
posted November 17th 2009 4:11PM
Sorry, dudes and dudettes: It seems that a number of you who've purchased Alienware M17x rigs are running into some serious latency issues, particularly skipping and stuttering audio. According to a reader named augur, he has pinged the company, from whom he has received "no positive response or resolution." In addition, we've come across a number of detailed complaints from users all over the Interwebs, including postings on the Notebook Review and Dell Community forums. So what's the deal, Dell? Are you on this, or what? And dear readers, have you been running into problems with your Alienware?
[Thanks, augur]
Update: Dell and Alienware pinged us to say that they are aware of the issue and making strides to issue a fix. Huzzah!
[Thanks, augur]
Update: Dell and Alienware pinged us to say that they are aware of the issue and making strides to issue a fix. Huzzah!
This is surprising indeed!
Had this issue with my dell precision laptop... turned out to be a old/bad sata driver. After I updated it (as recommended by the drivers page on dell's site), everything was fine.
Yes. What kind of a moron buys a high-end gaming laptop and doesn't use an X-Fi card? (Even if its only EAX4)
All they need to do is downgrade to Windows XP to get everything working properly. Windows XP is in many ways superior to both Vista 1 and Vista 2 (aka Windows 7).
Solution is simple. If it is powered by Nvidia, users need to disable nvidia powermizer using this utility and bam!! all audio stutterings will be things of the past.
use the link to download http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/24469-powermizer-switch-1-2/
I am certainly not surprised and have to agree that the audio stuttering on my Precision M4300 is certainly caused by nnidia powermizer. this was my first thought when reading the headline.
@Paul: ditto on my latitude E6400. If you don't have the latest SATA driver the sound is horrible.
that, is just one more reason why I will never spend money on a Dell computer.
You beat me to it... damn shiny overpriced Dells... Just an XPS in drag...
I hate dell, they never sent me my computer. I tried to contact them, but they just sent me in circles for days. They earned $699 from my bank account for being microsoft homos
@ jason
What does MSFT have to do with Dell not shipping your computer?!?!?!?!? Youre an idiot if you didnt get a refund for a non-shipped product.
@jason
Yes...I'm sure Microsoft whispered to Dell, "hey, buddy...see that guy? Take his money without giving him his computer. It'll be awesome man!"
Dullard.
me too.
I voted it up for using "dullard".
Yah because Apple is flawless. So is HP. So is Sony and Gateway. The reality is I'm sitting infront of a HP who's vcard may have just up and died on it. every hardware manufacturer sucks to a certain extent. And sorry as a person who does repair work on these systems I can tell you right now the number of Alienware laptops that we work on is a drop compaired to your average Dell. the design is just better and no its not just an XPS under the hood. Anyone who has worked on these devices knows DAMN well this isn't the case. These systems were designed to move the air in the system much more readily then an XPS, as such the average Alienware system isn't worked on nearly as frequently as say an XPS 1640 system.
I have to agree. I don't understand why you got downvoted for talking about Dell's bad customer support. Trying to call anyone at tell is useless, you just get Indian call centers where they are unwilling/unable to do anything to help you. I had to end up calling out dell publicly in their twitter to get help with my issue, and ended up just returning the product because i felt the process was rediculous.
I have only ever purchased one Alienware laptop. It was $4000 and had the screen of a $400 netbook. I hated it. I guess I was spared this latest Alienware laptop fiasco by vowing never to buy Alienware again. Ironically, Dell, who purchased Alienware, makes a great XPS laptop with a beautiful display for about half the cost. =)
So you bought a $4000 laptop with the screen of a $400 netbook. Call me skeptical...what model was it? And how did it's screen compare to a netbook's screen?
I've read reviews of netbooks that have screens with far better contrast and brightness levels than mid-range 15in laptops. MBP included. Wouldn't it be a GOOD thing to have a screen that was the quality of a netbook's? =\
Yes I have, although it seems to be a lot worse on Windows 7 than Vista - Win7 causes actual audio stuttering, but Vista doesn't.
I have a M15x (the new one) and it is phenomal. Thats what you get for buying the cheapo M17x, it doesnt have a core i7 :P
Man, Alienware used to be awesome before Dell sucked the life out of it.
So true. So true.
Yeah Alienware use to set the bar in computing. Now that its Dell.... well here's your answer/ sign.
Are you kidding? Everyone I know who has purchased an Alienware both before and after the Dell buyout has had nothing but problems. Endless game-stopping problems. Off the top of my head, that's at least 5 different people with one or more Alienware laptops.
Even at my workplace, they purchased 4 or so highest end desktops complete with the 2x2 monitor array Alienware was selling bundled. Of the four, maybe 2 are working at a given time, each of them with their own strange problems. I think they've now wasted more money trying to fix them than it would've cost to just build them from scratch.
agreed with nerdtalker
alien-ware was the monstercable of computers. If you were at the "power-user" level and needed an alienware computer (this is at the time they were popular) you would just build your own. Alien-ware tried to counter this by saying that they had "custom written drivers" which sounded a lot like "gold plating" and "nitrous ejection" especially since they never updated there custom drivers and were pretty much useless after the first graphics card or DX update came out.
I guess you get what you pay for, but if you are going to dish out this kind of money you are better off just getting a custom notebook made.
This is why smart people build their own.
Buy a Dell or any ready made system, and you swap the flexibility of a modular product design with a huge number of options for a black box.
@Grammar Delinquent and John Bailey
I guess you didn't know Alienware before they were popularized. They went down hill fast once they became popular, quality went right out the window when millions wanted to buy them. I haven't bought a pre-built machine (not including the random laptop) since the mid 90's. So....
I always thought of Falcon Northwest or self-built computers as top-tier honest poweruser machines... Alienware knew how to build something with top components sure, but it seemed to rely a bit too much on its advertising and alien-face cases for my tastes.
@"monica" you are a dude. Get off these male-orientated sites with your blonde pic and your links to dating sites.
Everyone can see through your crap. Obviously you like and know allot about videogames, but know nothing about cars and just go to those sites to chime in. What chick on earth talks about wireless video game adapters? none, thats who.
Dude, how much do you get paid when people click through to that dating site?
@larry raines: Regardless of his/her true sex, or whether the link points to a random dating site, all Monica's posts I've seen seem on topic and add something to the conversation. Having a link in his/her profile doesn't really matter as long as it's not in the actual comments and as long as the comments aren't just spam. You, on the other hand, keep copy pasting that same exact freaking message over and over again(13 times, so far), spamming the comments section with it.
My two cents:
I have never understood the appeal of paying a computer manufacturer more than what you could have built the machine for. A friend of mine, before I educated him, thought Alienware was the coolest shit ever and had to have one (no offense to anyone who owns one.). Odd Alien faces and the X-files aside, IMO, if you know much about computer components and want a gaming rig that looks "cool" you are far better off building your own machine.
Laptop wise, there's an "outrageous" (once again IMO) premium in buying any laptop with the Alienware logo on it. I got my PowerPro (Compal) IFL-90 in October of 07 (ordered in August). T7500, 2 gigs of Ram (now 4), Nvidia 8600 GT 512 version for right around $17-1800 with a 3 year warranty. The closest thing Dell / Alienware could supply was approximately $500 more.
There are just better deals to be had out there for that kind of money.
@Mako I guess me and you are in the same boat, I shelled out a ton of money for a dell about 4 years ago, worst decision of my life. Sent it back for repairs, they held onto it for two months, I had to call them to get them to send it back, and it was never fixed. This was after waiting over a month for it to be built. Talk about awesome customer service! (Oh yeah, and right now I am typing on a Studio XPS 16 that I am completely happy with... haha)
So odd you guys all are complaining about Dell laptops. I had a Inspiron 8600 with a Radeon 9600 Pro a little while back man that thing was awesome. I kept it for like 4 years before selling it for $300 to my nephew. I never had real problems with the hardware, only once did I have issues with the wireless nic and they sent me a new one before I mailed the old one back and after that it was bulletproof. It worked great with Win XP and Ubuntu. So maybe they've gone down hill recently but back 5 years ago Dell rocked.
A lot of laptops have been having this issue. Macs have the issue in BootCamp as well. If I remember correctly, it's something to do with the Broadcom chipset of the WiFi card not playing well with the Intel audio drivers or something. They talked on the NBR link (great resource btw) about disabling the the extra band on the WiFi card (I assume N if you're not using it).
If you look around on NBR, I think the Mac owners found a slight fix by using different drivers for either the WiFi card, the audio, or both.
I bought a brand spanking new m15x when it was first released over a year ago, and have had problems with it since day one. Even after it being returned for repairs, they only fixed on of the 8 problems I had listed. This doesn't surprise me at all that they are having problems with the M17x as well.
Never buy Alienware.
I purchased an Alienware for my wife years ago and it had this exact same problem from day one. After several support calls they wanted me to send it back for repair....it was a week old. I eventually agreed and after weeks they sent it back and they had replaced the CD-ROM drive. Needless to say that didn't fix the problem and I had to fight with them for a long time to get resolution. Not sure if this is still the same or not, but at the time Alienware's laptops were being made by Clevo, could still be the same even though they are Dell owned.
My nephew bought one a couple years ago and it was advertised as 4gb of system ram. It shows 4gb in the bios, but once it gets into the os it only shows 2.5 available. After many calls to tech support they finally told him that 1.5gb is dedicated to the two video cards in sli. He was pretty pissed because that's not how it was advertised. Other than that it's been pretty solid he said. For $3,800 it should have had 8gb ram if you ask me.
that exact same problem is found on the macbooks running bootcamp. Since day 1 of bootcamp, apple didn't care to fix it (there are some pretty easy workarounds, not thanks to apple...).
The problem in bootcamp is on the bootcamp.exe, changing the affinity to core 1 fixed it (not a simple thing to be done automatically on an x64 windows). The other component that generates latency is the audio driver, but the latest driver from the manufacturer fixed it too. Perhaps something like this can be found on this Alienware.
I know that Dell cares about support so a fix won't take too long.
I love dell as a company, because every time dell sells a computer, they make a new customer for Apple.
Out of the frying pan, into the fire...
Yeah man, it is so stupid. Even their studio xps 13/16 has this problem. And c'mon it is a studio laptop but yet you can do anything having to do with streaming audio/video! My cheap desktop dated back in 2005 gets way better results than the dells. They better fix this problem or else we're gonna riot! *shakes fists at dell*
I have a Dell Studio XPS 1340, and with BIOS A11 it works great under Windows 7. Been sitting through a remote class on WebSphere for the last couple of days with no scratching or popping, even with the crappy TANDBERG client. I listen to music with Etymotic hf5 canalphones, and it's fantastic. So I imagine they'll probably trip over the issue with a BIOS/driver update.
I have a studio xps 16, been running 7 since beta (pre-rc) and have not had a single problem with it (audio or anything else)
I have a Dell Studio XPS 1640. I use it to record 16 channels of 48/24 waves via firewire from my Mackie Onxy 1640.....just noticed the same numbering...anyway. The latency issues with said laptop is not nearly as bad as what is displayed in the article, i see about 60 -100 us in Windows 7. For most systems, you can relieve this by disabling things in the BIOS like HPET, bluetooth, any other unused stuff. Also, disable cpu throtling. In windows, Set the machine to the Performance power profile. And when recording audio, disable WiFi. Also, in the case of Win 7 and firewire, make sure to use the LEGACY driver, the newer firewire driver is no good for audio. What is being displayed by the DPC latency tool in this article is rediculous....I dont think its hardware directly, could be a BIOS setting and/or driver combination. Bios updates from Dell redeuced DPC latency a good bit for me.
DPC is an issue on alot of laptops, especially those sold by Dell.
My Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1 is completely useless in Vista or Windows 7 due to the DPC latency issue: audio just mysteriously drops out for 5 seconds at a time... yet it isn't *as much* an issue in Windows XP, or the issue manifests itself differently: just the occasional click / pop.
I've had the m15x for about a year. Experienced several problems, including a dead HDD and malfunctioning Alienware drivers since I bought it. Some intermittent stuttering in audio and video, though the last BIOS fixed the audio issue. Still get choppy video playback on the web. Alienware has awful support. They're also pretty rude on the phone.
i have one of the original m15x lappys, and I remember the x34 bios caused massive latency spikes, so we had to revert to x32...then after a couple weeks the released x36 which fixed the latency spikes..
i don't recall stuttering audio, but while gaming, for example, it seemed like you'd get a few seconds of bullettime (per say)....and some keyboard/mouse input lag...
I just got my m17x last weekend
i have this sound issue
and my baby likes to lock up more than 10 times a day!
go dell, umm, i mean alienware
or is it windows 7 the culprit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I remember Dell's Studio line (especially the Studio XPS) suffer from this badly. Google 'Dell xps dpc latency' - entire threads about it! I was between a Studio XPS 16 and a MBP (for music production), had a chat via the online interface on dell UK, asked about the issue and had a very abrupt response to the effect of 'It's a software issue, a fix will be available' - the agent promptly left before I could say anything further! Afaik, it's something to do with the hardware of the device... disabling stuff like WiFi, BlueTooth etc all had an affect.
Got the MBP instead, never looked back!
my refurbished xps 13 laptop works just fine after 2 years. Have had no problems with it. I suggest going with refurbished Dell equipment.