Alienware M15 R3

Cpt_Poopie_Pants · January 25, 2021

I just bought a Alienware M15 R3 from a coworker. its about a year old. Its already having problems (ill discuss later) and id like to know if and what i can upgrade. I have used google but the variants between this series laptop change constantly. With that said I was hoping someone would help shed some light on the upgradability of the system.

Alienware M15 R3 I7 10th gen, 32 gigs ram 1TB M.2 on raid 0, a 2080 Super card and OLED 60HrZ screen.

Now, as of yesterday the laptop showed a yellow-ish screen indicating low battery, the system powered down and will not turn on. No lights, fans or any other indication of booting. the laptop wont power on at all. it wont even post, I've tried all the recommended steps from Dell but i still have a dead laptop. Its under warranty and waiting to hear from the Dell support team as to when a tech will be coming out. Has anyone had this issue and found a fix?

Bombastinator · January 25, 2021

Alienware these days is just a Dell. Dell has a horrible rep for interoperability. There tendency to make a part totally proprietary and unrepairable in order to save 15¢ is legendary. The raid0 dual 500 for 1tb or one gig for 2tb drives drives likely means bad things. M.2 doesn’t like to raid much. It frequently doesn’t do hardware raid at all. The point that it’s a laptop, which you buried, says it is really really unlikely you will be able to change much. Sometimes not even ram. Laptops often aren’t upgradable at all. The whole thin-and-light trend mostly means everything is vga soldered just to save one more millimeter of thickness. There used to be big ass desktop replacement laptops that were more luggables than laptops that actually had replacable parts, but the whole thinness at any cost thing generally winds up meaning “at really high cost” without looking at specifics your chances of being able to do more than swap out more than one memory stick is probably pretty poor. Storage is usually still swappable but that raid0 very likely shoots that in the face. Raid does very little good on SSDs so you get problems with near ‘nuff no advantage at all.