New old computer – Alienware 17

I have a fairly regular customer who brings in old PCs and laptops, previously owned by his son (now left home and in employment), and gets me to extract the user data off the hard drives and put it onto a succession of external drives. I also remove the hard drives and give them to him for safe keeping. Up until recently he was taking the old PCs away too. At his last visit, I was about to make a trip to the local charity recycling centre to dispose of a van load of IT hardware, and I suggested I get rid of the computers I had worked on for him in the past, if he had no use for them. He agreed and brought back all the desktops and laptops, including the last computer I did for him, an Alienware 17.

Quick specs are Intel Core I7-4710MQ, with 16GB DDR3 ram, 256GB SSD and an AMD Radeon R9 M290X graphics card. 17.3″ screen, and a light show built into the case that could be programmed to look better than a Las Vegas Casino.

This computer is a beast, and apparently it was his sons pride and joy. It certainly looked well maintained but well used. I was curious as to why he had got rid of it, and  even though I had taken out the 1TB HDD the 256GB M.2 2230 SSD was still in place. It booted up fairly normally into Windows 10, and a quick look showed it had a very early edition of Windows 10 installed (1503?), and appeared to have been upgraded in about 2018. As I used it, it became apparent it had issues. Every now and then the fan would go to full speed and the computer would lock up. So I took the back off, and removed the main system fan and cleaned up the heat exchanger attached to the heat sink, and cleaned up the fan. It certainly ran cooler after this so I decided to persevere with it.

I though all issues would be solved with a repair upgrade to the latest version of Windows 10 (21H2), so  I did the upgrade. The computer worked fine, until the first reboot when it started the fan thing and the locking up again. I spent a week or so (on and off) researching what was going on, there are many variations of this problem on Alienware 17s, and I went through a lot of iterations of installs, starting with Windows 8 and rolling forward, as well as straight installs.

The issue seemed to revolve around the driver installs that follow normal windows 10 updates and upgrades, and similar things happened when I installed the Alienware software manually.

Eventually, I did a fresh install of Windows 10 21H2, but did  not connect it to the internet, so used a local account etc. I downloaded the latest drivers for the Alienware 17 from the Dell website on another PC, using the Service Code off the laptop. I then installed each driver and update in a logical progression, starting with Intel Chip drivers, network, audio drivers, including software for the Alienware specific hardware etc. Finally I was left with just two drivers, the Intel Video drivers, and the AMD video drivers. The Intel driver installed fine, and allowed full use of the excellent screen etc, but the AMD driver when installed immediately started locking the system and setting the fan off.  One other driver is not available, and that is for the built in SD card reader. The available driver for this shows an error after install, because the hardware is not compatible,

Anyway, the AMD video card issue is something I remember from the early days of Windows 10, and a lot of machines were bricked because of incompatibility between the Windows supplied drivers and the cards. Solutions included downloading AMD drivers from their website, and not letting windows update the drivers directly. This issue was bit different. Windows had no drivers for this card at install time, so at the first opportunity, Windows update was downloading a driver for the card which caused issues. In addition, when I downloaded the recommended driver myself and installed it, the same issue occurred.

Much time was spent trying to find a driver that worked, but there was little to read on the web about this. So how about a different card? Yes, Nvidia also did a card for this machine, but getting one would be at least $600 and I would need a new heat sink and exchanger to go with it.

Final solution? Remove the AMD card, heat sink and exchanger and attached fan from the computer, and allow the computer  to use the Intel card for everything. Yes it emasculates a once great gaming machine, but this laptop is going to be used for emails, web browsing and some programing on a desk in the lounge. The removal of a card and fan reduces heat build up, and removes one very noisy fan.

So I now have a very heavy (was 9.11 lbs, now quite a bit less) laptop which looks cool, feels very substantial and high quality. and uses a lot less power than it used to. Its fast and responsive, but the keyboard needs a heavy touch occasionally. Its a shame when hardware and software won’t play nicely, and a fix takes this amount of time and effort to find. The computer (in fact the whole range of computers I worked on for this customer) were used for some fairly heavy photographic manipulation, from early days while at school, to apparently becoming the owner’s source of income. Not sure if this solution would have been appropriate back in 2018.