A Digression from WoW...

I'm a little irritated.

I'm not a rich man. So when I decided to purchase a gaming laptop, I made sure that it was going to be a sound investment (I thought I did at the time, anyway); made sure it had the power to run games with ease, process video and graphics, have a nice display, and enough memory so that I wouldn't need to upgrade for quite awhile.

Found the rig I have today, and there really weren't too many horror stories when I made the purchase. Certainly not like I'm finding today.

I've been all over the net, blogs, reviews and forums, and have found a very striking conclusion: QUADCORES SUCK. In laptops, anyway. Apparently theres an issue with the heat sink not making good contact, combined with an aptitude to heat up quickly, which causes the graphical/sound "stuttering" that I've been experiencing.

To solve this problem, Alienware attempted to remove heat from the system
through a BIOS update (version B14) which undervolted the CPU. Admittedly, the
stuttering was reduced after installing B14; however, it does still occur.
Additionally, by undervolting the CPU they caused massive instability
issues. (Apparently no stuttering issues in dual core processors).

I'm no rocket scientist, but this don't look good.

I called Alienware today to see what the possible solutions are for the problem, and was given crap responses such as: they'll check speakers, replace vid cards, reformat, etc. And when I brought up the issue of the faulty heat sink, the ESL (english as second language) person on the other end of the line became very defensive. No es bueno. Now, I've read plenty of horror stories from consumers returning their quad-core rigs multiple times, each time, having it return home with the same issues. I'm not that guy. I don't have the patience to deal with those guys again today (who mostly seem to lack customer service skills, other than Dennis--mad props homie), so I'll probably call again tomorrow and request either a re-configuration, or a refund. Either way, wish me luck.

Just in case you're wondering:
Alienware M17
2.0 GHZ Q9000 Quad Core CPU
4 GB DDR3 @ 1067 MHZ
1 GB ATI HD 4850 x2 (Crossfire)
250GB x2 7200RPM sata HD (Raid-0)
Vista x64