I have been dealing with Dell's tech support and parts department for many years as an independent VAR. I frequently work on customers Dells and this is my experience:
1) I will NOT attempt to act as a proxy for my customers if they own a Dell Dimension. Dell makes this incredibly difficult if not impossible. They want to speak with the person who purchased the computer and just generally make it a logistical nightmare.in addition, I can't understand a thing they say. I essentially tell them, if they can get Dell to send them parts, I'll install them and get the machine back up and running, but thats about it.
2) If you want decent service, purchase an Optiplex from their business division. I can tell you from experience that the difference in support and response is night and day. Recently I had an Optiplex in my store with bad capacitors. This was a know issue and Dell had acknowledged it. I believe they had earmarked something like $300 Million to deal with this issue. They sent out a tech promptly, but replacing the motherboard didn't fix the issue (even though it had bulging caps). A day or two later another fella showed up with another motherboard and a small "daughter card" that controls the on/off switch. That appeared to fix it. I wasn't in the store when that took place but I told my mangager to make sure the tech reboots the computer at least 10 times before he leaves. She caught him on his way out the door and had him reboot it several times and... You guessed it, it failed again.
Two days later the original tech showed up with a power supply. That fixed the issue. The sad part is that these so-called "techs" arent even trained or instructed to do multiple shutdowns/restarts. Thats a gimme in hardware situations. All in all, Dell held up their end of the bargain... But at a price. This was an Optiplex purchased through their business division.
Lastly, there are just enough differences between Dimension motherboards and generic boards that I won't even attempt to put a 3rd party board in a Dell. I have also been told by some collegues that even their power supplies are proprietary. And I tend to believe him because in the case stated above, one of the things we tried when the first tech came out was a standard ATX12V power supply and it didn't fix it, yet the Dell power supply fixed it.
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