My horror story in dealing with Dell's customer "service" starts over a year ago when I first purchased my laptop from them. From the start, the computer had heating problems and would freeze up after any kind of use that demanded more than a fraction of the computer's hardware power.
This was not acceptable as a brand-new produce. So, I called their tech support and after no less than 40 minutes later I was connected to India with their broken-english tech agent. The agent insisted that this was a software issue even though the laptop was right out of the box. He had me run some basic diagnostics which did not reveal the problem, so he told me there was none. I just wanted to send the laptop back for them to fix at their repair lab or for them to replace it, but he told me that "we can't fix it if we don't know what's wrong with it."
This idea behind hardware support is ridiculous. It'd be ludicrous if other businesses, such as an automobile repair shop, handled its customers over the phone like Dell tries to. It'd be like telling the customer over the phone how to look under the hood to find the problem before they could service it.
So, after this initial "scuffle" with their tech support I later found out that it was a cooling problem with the system and proceeded to buy an external fan to hold me over at school until I could get back home and try to handle the problem again. Low and behold, the laptop worked alright with the fan right up until a week after the motherboard finally failed (this was only a year after purchase) and the system would not turn on altogether. At this point, the same tech agents were more than happy to sell me the hardware I needed now that I was out of warranty.
So, I bought a $650 motherboard from them and at the same time purchased the $300 at-home installation service. I recieved the motherboard after a week, but the installation service never came. Their people claimed that their "at-home installation skew" was down and that no at-home installers could be appointed without it. I assumed that this would be a temporary problem as they illustrated... But their skew was down for an entire month and a half. How could a COMPUTER company operate with this kind of nation-wide system failure of their installation services?
I eventually had the motherboard replaced by a private company for much less than what Dell was charging (65$ as opposed to $300). Unfortunately, the laptop's motherboard only lasted a month before frying again.
They should have fixed my laptop the first day I called them with the problem instead of trying to help me fix it over the phone.
I hate Dell, and so should you and your friends.
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