I had my Alienware 17 R5 laptop start acting up and having failures. First the palm rest cracked. After investigating why, I found that the battery on it has swelled up and that is damaged. Shortly afterwards I started having CPU fan noises develop. After blowing it out with compressed air, the fan filed completely. Next, the keyboard had some keys start to not work. Is this a sign to get a new laptop? Yes, it was. I went onto Dell's website where I have a credit account. I wanted to have 32GB of RAM at a minimum a 1TB m.2 SSD because the new Alienware m17 R3 no longer had 2.5" drive bays and I needed a large drive for data storage. After doing that search on the Outlet inventory, I realized that the ONLY way I could do that is get a truly insane spec laptop. It is at my house in the US - I go back starting tomorrow and should be unpacking it on Thursday. What did I get that was so insane? i9-10980hk 32GB RAM (soldered on the MB - no longer user upgrade-able) 2x 2TB m.2 NVME SSDs (2280 format) 1x 512GB m.2 NVME SSD (2230 format) Nividia 2080 video 802.11ac wireless Unfortunately for me, the only way the drives that were available were over 1TB was if you bought one that had 2x 2TB drives in RAID-0 for OS/Apps and the 512GB drive for Data. WHAT?!? RAID-0, with the larger drives for OS/Apps?!? 512GB for data storage?!? That should be the other way around, shouldn't it? Then it occurred to me what Dell was doing. Screwed up things! They decided to push the price of this system a lot higher by adding a pretty much worthless 512GB m.2 SSD 2230 form factor. Why useless? The drive is not that fast in way of comparison to the 2x 2TB drives. It is also in a form factor that is really limited utility. I would rather not have the 512GB drive and would have loved to remove it from my new system but Dell doesn't allow it - if you want the 2TB drives, you have to buy it with the 512GB drive. If you wanted the 2080 Super video card, you had to get the 2x 1TB+ m.2 SSDs with it. What ever happened to giving the customer choices on the way their systems are setup? Oh, the reason why I didn't just buy the one with a single drive is that they don't offer the 32GB RAM option. Dang, these companies are getting evil.
