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I’ve waited almost five weeks for it and today I finally took possession of a new gaming laptop I order back in the dim and distant past from Irish computer manufacturer, Alienware.

I was initially very displeased with my order when, after three weeks and more, it still appeared to be in a queue awaiting production. This state suggested, at minimum, another three week wait. Not good.

I called Alienware with a serious threat to cancel my order because of the delay. This, as you might expect, bought action. Lo and behold, within a couple of days of my telephone call, I checked the order’s progress and it had been shipped!

Of course, now I had that ever present problem of coinciding my being at home with DHL deciding to deliver the thing. Some minor shenanigans and another couple of calls to DHL later and we find ourselves at midday today, with my at the door, grin from ear to ear signing for a large box.

The machine itself is quite lovely and does what I bought it for with panache – play games. I’m slowly coming to terms with dirtying myself on Vista but will resist the nagging desire to wipe and downgrade to XP.

I’ve enjoyed the odd snatch of Crysis this evening and it runs at a good whack at a very decent setting so I am officially happy.

Now to report the problem.

One of the minor selling points of the Alienware M17X (my model) is its aesthetics. Sure, I’m a sucker for flashy hardware but I did actually buy it for its performance.

That said, the coloured lights, alien head (see above) engraved plaque and, importantly, customisable backlit keyboard sure would turn heads and I was looking forward to showing them off.

One of the first things I did was to fire up the software for configuring the lights. What? There’s nothing for the keyboard and it’s remaining stubbornly dim.

A lot of messing around and I couldn’t figure it out. I searched the web and found that I should have purchased an extra add-on for the backlight of the keyboard at £33.

I’m not exactly a web virgin so I couldn’t understand how I could miss such a requirement. Sure enough, upon revisiting the customise pages of the laptop, it is very misleading and there’s actually nothing at all to say that the add-on is required to light up the keyboard.

To be honest, I could actually live without a backlit keyboard but the problem is that this is how the laptop has been designed. Where as a normal keyboard would have white lettering on its black keys, the M17X has clear letters on a black key making them all but impossible to see in anything other than pure daylight.

I’m using the laptop to write this blog entry and if I couldn’t touch type I’d be royally screwed. The intentionally meager light from a couple of LED lamps on my desk does nothing to illuminate the keys and I can’t actually see any of the letters on them.

Disaster.

Now the good news. I called Alienware, complaining that the requirement for the keyboard upgrade is far from clear (actually, it’s not even approaching clear nor is there even any room for confusion – it simply doesn’t say that you need it).

The guy at Alienware was initially defensive but when I told him to look at the ordering page he ended up agreeing with me.

The thought that I might have to send my laptop straight back only to wait another five weeks for it to be returned didn’t exactly fill me with joy but Alienware actually offered to send me the backlit keyboard separately!

They made me promise to call customer support once again and have a hardware tech talk me through the installation (which I’ll do – they’ve been good so far) but it looks like it should be pretty simple to do.

So I’ve now got a fully functional new gaming laptop that’s playing games at a whacking pace and in a few days I’ll have it tricked out with the backlit keyboard.

Points off to Alienware for the initial delay. Some of those points are earned back after they hastened the delayed order after my phone call. They now get a few more points off for their lack of clarity on the keyboard situation but a few back for sending me a new one.

I’ll reinstate their final missing points (and may actually leave them in the black) if they change the design of their cusomise pages on their website so that others don’t make my mistake. Apparently they were going to do it before and now promise me that they’ll do it now.

I’ll give it a few days to see if they actually do.