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I get an educational discount with Dell that I can't get from other vendors. That made the choice of Dell a no-brainer. I wanted a notebook in the sub 15" size range. The 15" screens are just a bit bigger than I'm comfortable with for portable kit. At the same time I wanted a display resolution better than the all-too-common 1330x768 which isn't bad but I feel is too low for a 13"-14" screen. And I wanted a quad core i7. This narrowed my choices to about 6 models. Half of those were ultrabooks with weak integrated GPUs, effectively worthless for contemporary games. I specced out the remaining three at comparable levels within my budget. The M14xR2 came out $150 and $300 less than the other two models and has a faster CPU, faster RAM, better screen, and mSSD cache. The other two models are half a pound lighter and half an inch slimmer. So what? Those are unnoticed in my pack.

Good news, everyone. I successfully flashed Dell's stock A04 firmware over A09 this morning using the recovery method. Restored the default firmware settings and started up without difficulty plus one reboot for device changes. If you bricked your M14x then try the recovery procedure again, try again with a cleanly formatted flash drive, or try with a different flash drive. I was then able to flash svl7's unlocked A03 firmware using the provided InsydeFlash tool. Edit: I was also able to flash the stock A04 over the unlocked A03 with the InsydeFlash tool. Looks like a working 'down'grade.

Did you flash the unlocked A03 or A04? What file name for the firmware file? Did you try flashing A08 or A09 afterwards?

Since I have nothing to lose, and I consider myself somewhat technically competent, I decided to try some experiments with mine. Starting with the A08 stock, I was unable to install the A04 firmware with the InsydeFlash tool per previous posting. The A09 firmware installed without a hitch. The A08 firmware installed over the A09 firmware also without a hitch. I then flashed the A09 firmware (A09.fd) using the USB recovery method just to ensure that this method still works. Did not work. I tried renaming the A09 file to match the stock A04 file. Still did not work. In both cases I see some LED flashing on the USB stick and then nothing. The system just sits with the fans spinning and the power button lights going through their color cycle. No beeps, no evidence of a firmware flash. I stopped at this point. I figure it's just a matter of getting the correct name for the firmware file for the Insyde firmware to pick it up. My GoogleFu is failing to find this information and lunch takes priority over hacking since I'm hungry and I sometimes make mistakes when I'm hungry.

Not always optional. Recently shipping units have these updated firmware versions. My M14xR2 shipped mid-September 2012 with the A08 firmware revision. The Insyde flash tool refuses to load the Dell stock A04 firmware.

That's the rub. OS X isn't sold. It's licensed. You can't buy it. You don't own it. You don't have any rights to it. You only have the permissions explicitly granted by Apple in the license agreement. Any use contrary to the license terms is a violation of Apple's copyrights. That's what the federal courts have ruled. Read up on the Apple v. Psystar case that I've mentioned and previously linked. Actually, you may be in violation of parts of the DMCA which prohibit the dissemination of information intended to circumvent anti-copying technologies such as those that exist in OS X to prevent it from running on non-Apple hardware. I'm not saying that you are ethically wrong. I think that the whole licensed-not-sold deal is completely BS. My opinion, however, does not change the law in the US where the T|I forums are hosted.

The finish seems to be pretty durable on mine. If you're concerned about wear then there's always Contact Paper. It's cheap, durable, easy to clean, and should be thin enough so as not to mar the display panel if you don't use a keyboard cover.

Run Device Manager. Expand the "Processors" section. You should see 1 processor for each core available. If not then run msconfig.exe. Select the Boot tab. Click "Advanced options". The box next to "Number of processors" should be unchecked (which means use all logical processors). If it is checked then uncheck it and reboot. Repeat the Device Manager check. If that doesn't fix it then you're going to have to ensure that all your logical cores are enabled in the BIOS/EFI. I don't know how to do that on the R1 models. And if that isn't it then it may be time to call Dell.

Maybe. It's part of Microsoft's requirements for Windows 8 certification. If the manufacturer wants the Windows 8 certification then it must ship with UEFI Secure Boot enabled. This is going to happen across Dell's entire product line, not just the Alienware kit. The A08 firmware adds the Secure Boot option, disabled by default because Windows 7 does not use Secure Boot. But like I just said, nobody is going to be working around anything until the security check is identified.

As an aside, I have run OS X on OS X using VirtualBox and VMware Fusion. Both are bad. VirtualBox is the worse of the two. No Guest Additions for OS X guests so all the things that you'd expect to work... simply don't. Even with a working set of VMware tools for OS X guests on Fusion there are things that don't work right: sound doesn't work, display sizing is dodgy, disk I/O performance is atrocious, and no accelerated 3D which is actually a big deal for OS X since the Quartz render system uses it extensively. Seriously. Stick with Windows 7 on the Alienware. Run Ubuntu or Mint in a VM if you want to play around with that and rent a network-based Mac instance if you want to try out OS X.

Impossible to say until someone analyzes the security check performed by the installer. If it's the installer then that check can be bypassed with a patched executable and the custom firmware flashed to the system. If it is the EFI then it might be easy or it might be impossible depending on precisely what the EFI is checking/validating. My expectation is that it is something in the EFI. This seems to be related to the UEFI Secure Boot feature which requires valid digital signatures for every step of the boot sequence.

The Apple v. Psystar case from 2008-2009. Apple Wins Court Victory Over Mac Clone Maker Psystar | PCWorld It comes down to the "licensed, not sold" clause in almost every software license agreement. If licensed then the licensor has every legal right to stipulate what hardware you install and run it on. Apple's OS X license explicitly forbids running OS X on non-Apple hardware and the federal court ruled it legally binding. An educational contrast is Dell's boilerplate BIOS file license terms which explicitly allow redistribution in both modified and unmodified forms. I've written my piece. It's up to the mods to determine what to do with it.

Put bluntly: this is piracy. The only legal ways to obtain OS X are with a new Macintosh computer or as an upgrade for a Macintosh computer running an earlier version of Mac OS X.

Reason one: It's illegal. Reason two: One buys Alienware for playing games. Neither Macintosh nor Ubuntu are good gaming platforms.

Dude, I pointed out last week that the A08 firmware won't permit a downgrade to anything earlier including stock A04. You're stuck on stock A09 until someone figures out how to get around the digital signature check. Unlocking the firmware won't make any difference if the EFI refused to accept the installation.

That's not the worst notebook meltdown I've experienced. I had a WinBook FX a while back. The battery charge circuit overheated, fried the motherboard, warped the entire bottom case and who knows what else for damage. Completely ruined.

A08 has been in the wild for about a month now and has shown no egregious problems so far. More likely, I figure, is that A09 has the problem and it's been locked until that problem is resolved.

FYI: Running OS X on non-Apple hardware is a violation of the OS X license terms. See Apple v. Psystar. The Lion and Mountain Lion licenses permit virtualization but only on Apple-branded host computers.

Install and run AlienAutopsy. That may give you an idea of what's wrong. If it's 10 months old then it should still be under Dell's standard 1 year hardware warranty. Call, find out the warranty status, find out what they have to say.

I mentioned this over in the general notebook area. The single cheapest thing you can do with the M14x is to elevate the back. This opens airflow around the bottom of the case. This in turn lets it run cooler at lower fan speeds. How much cooler? With the back of mine propped up I get CPU temps 10C cooler under near full load (video encoding with HandBrake) with the fan running at a lower speed. Right now, doing some encoding, I have CPU core temp peaks at ~70C with the back elevated. CPU core temps spike to 80C and the fan ramps up to full speed within about 30 seconds of lying it down flat on the table. I'll post some GPU temperature peaks later. Edit: I did some runs with the MSI Kombustor OpenGL stress test. Here are all of the results in a nice list. This is an unmodified M14xR2 w/ A08 firmware. No overclock firmware, no repasting. Specs in my signature. CPU Core temperatures Idle, Flat: 56C; Idle, Up: 55C Full, Flat: 80C; Full, Up: 70C GPU Core temperatures Idle, Flat: 51C; Idle, Up: 50C Full, Flat: 65C; Full, Up: 60C The fan quickly spins up to full speed under "Full, Flat" conditions for both CPU and GPU. The fan spins at approximately 2/3 maximum (I'm guessing based on noise) under "Full, Up" conditions.

Razer Deathadder at default (1800dpi?) and no drivers other than the stock Windows mouse drivers. I dislike higher DPI settings. Moves too quickly, less precision in my movements. I also dislike wireless. The latency bothers me.

Anything that improves airflow under the chassis works wonders especially on models with fans that exhaust down. When flat on the table my M14xR2's cores register peak temps at about 85C and average temps of about 80C under load with the fan running at full speed. With the back elevated and under the same load the cores peak at about 75C and average temps of about 72C and the fan runs slower. Anything that doesn't block the fan(s) works. In the past I have used books, engineering rulers (with the three "blades"), a folding x-shaped stand, even a pair of rubber door wedges (which are inexpensive and compact).

Windows 8 does not require UEFI Secure Boot. The requirement is that it be enabled for systems that ship with Windows 8 when the vendor wants the Windows 8 certification. It isn't required for Windows 8 upgrades although it can be enabled as an option by supported UEFI. The Secure Boot process is remarkably resistant to tampering. Remember MBR viruses? UEFI Secure Boot makes that impossible since it won't execute a boot loader that isn't correctly signed. The Windows boot loader won't load anything in kernel space that isn't correctly signed. And then the 64-bit kernel won't load unsigned 64-bit drivers. The weakest part of the whole chain is UEFI itself which would explain the signed firmware error I received. It's probably a good idea to hold off updating to the A08 or later firmware versions (once available) since it appears that going backwards is not permitted.

ArenaNet is good about less-than-cutting-edge systems for their games. My Vista-era Core 2 Duo w/ Radeon HD 5670 was getting 20-30fps at median settings during the beta weekends and at those times the game client was CPU-bound. Anything of that era or newer other than netbooks should do okay. By way of comparison, I have a little HP netbook with an AMD E-450 chipset. That tops at around 8fps at minimum settings. On my M14xR2 (no overclocking) the frame rate is limited by the 60Hz display refresh.

I figure that's exactly what they did. F12 on my M14x brings up a Boot Manager screen with options for "legacy boot", "network boot" and "UEFI boot" along with options to start the diagnostics partition and system setup. Seems likely now that you mention it. One of the options on mine is for "Secure Boot" set off since Windows 7 doesn't have a UEFI Secure Boot loader. If Dell starts shipping Windows 8 then that will be enabled but not locked on in order to have the Windows 8 sticker on the palm rest. If they keep Windows 7 as an option (which I fully expect they will given how long Windows XP was available) then that will be disabled for the Windows 7 units.