Hi folks,
I'm kinda at my wit's end with this computer, but I feel bad selling it to someone else so I'd reaaaaallly like to fix it.
On paper it should be a great machine, it's an Alienware m17 r5 with a 6900HX and a 7850m GPU, 32gb ram, 1tb nvme, 4k screen. Instead, it's the most expensive, useless, hot, $2000 brick I've ever owned. Dell support was equally as useless until the motherboard died, which they did replace, and then continued being useless until the warranty ran out. Now they tell me to GFMS.
I'm on my 4th install of windows 11, an OS I've come to loathe as much as this laptop, but I'm not sure who's really at fault. I've "solved" some of the instability issues by disabling some of its main features, most notably "Smart" Access graphics. A feature that would cause the laptop to absolutely freak out for minutes at a time while switching graphics, would switch inextricably and often to the wrong configuration, and frequently cause black screens requiring restarts. Going into BIOS and turning it to always use the discrete card solved the instability, but rendered the power saving features as useless as the rest of it. I do however get fairly frequent black screen freezes.
Here's the next big issue I'd like to solve: the lack of sleep, shut downs during sleep when it finally gets there, and other power issues like that. I travel a lot, and work a lot. I'm often in off-grid situations where I'm on solar and batteries. I need to be able to pause my work and put the laptop to sleep at night without losing progress on encodes, etc. My old win 10 laptop did this beautifully and as basic, as-expected functionality. This computer has real trouble falling asleep. The fans run foreeeeevvvveeerrr, and if I put it in a bag, it will often run til it overheats and shuts down. If it does go to sleep, it will be off by morning, losing everything running. My old lappy, by contrast, would sleep immediately if I told it to or if I pressed the power button. It would not shut down in the middle of the night. The fans would not spool up at random for long periods. It would also wake up quickly, this one is slower than my old windows 7 box on an SSD. If the battery ran low on my old laptop, it would write a save state on the nvme in a few seconds that would resume perfectly when I plugged in and woke it up, which it did quickly. Mostly I use this for encoding video, editing photos, the rare video game, and occasional design in Fusion. The video encoding is what drives me nuts. I can be encoding a video for 8 hours, lose all progress during a shutdown, and have to start over the next day, only to lose it the following night again. It's maddening.
I currently have automatic sleep set to never when plugged in so encodes can run, otherwise the computer interrupts the encodes to try and sleep. I also only want the computer to sleep or wake when I press the power button, not closing or opening the lid or anything else. I don't want random wake ups and overheating. So I have lid options and power button options set that way. For some brilliant reason I cannot access power options in device manager for the keyboard or anything in device manager.
Thanks in advance for reading this far and any help offered!
I'm kinda at my wit's end with this computer, but I feel bad selling it to someone else so I'd reaaaaallly like to fix it.
On paper it should be a great machine, it's an Alienware m17 r5 with a 6900HX and a 7850m GPU, 32gb ram, 1tb nvme, 4k screen. Instead, it's the most expensive, useless, hot, $2000 brick I've ever owned. Dell support was equally as useless until the motherboard died, which they did replace, and then continued being useless until the warranty ran out. Now they tell me to GFMS.
I'm on my 4th install of windows 11, an OS I've come to loathe as much as this laptop, but I'm not sure who's really at fault. I've "solved" some of the instability issues by disabling some of its main features, most notably "Smart" Access graphics. A feature that would cause the laptop to absolutely freak out for minutes at a time while switching graphics, would switch inextricably and often to the wrong configuration, and frequently cause black screens requiring restarts. Going into BIOS and turning it to always use the discrete card solved the instability, but rendered the power saving features as useless as the rest of it. I do however get fairly frequent black screen freezes.
Here's the next big issue I'd like to solve: the lack of sleep, shut downs during sleep when it finally gets there, and other power issues like that. I travel a lot, and work a lot. I'm often in off-grid situations where I'm on solar and batteries. I need to be able to pause my work and put the laptop to sleep at night without losing progress on encodes, etc. My old win 10 laptop did this beautifully and as basic, as-expected functionality. This computer has real trouble falling asleep. The fans run foreeeeevvvveeerrr, and if I put it in a bag, it will often run til it overheats and shuts down. If it does go to sleep, it will be off by morning, losing everything running. My old lappy, by contrast, would sleep immediately if I told it to or if I pressed the power button. It would not shut down in the middle of the night. The fans would not spool up at random for long periods. It would also wake up quickly, this one is slower than my old windows 7 box on an SSD. If the battery ran low on my old laptop, it would write a save state on the nvme in a few seconds that would resume perfectly when I plugged in and woke it up, which it did quickly. Mostly I use this for encoding video, editing photos, the rare video game, and occasional design in Fusion. The video encoding is what drives me nuts. I can be encoding a video for 8 hours, lose all progress during a shutdown, and have to start over the next day, only to lose it the following night again. It's maddening.
I currently have automatic sleep set to never when plugged in so encodes can run, otherwise the computer interrupts the encodes to try and sleep. I also only want the computer to sleep or wake when I press the power button, not closing or opening the lid or anything else. I don't want random wake ups and overheating. So I have lid options and power button options set that way. For some brilliant reason I cannot access power options in device manager for the keyboard or anything in device manager.
Thanks in advance for reading this far and any help offered!
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