Freddie, that experience I have never heard from with Dell. Of course, like any compnay, they have bad times, sometimes you may get a member of staff who should not be answering phones or lacks the graces to deal with difficult and annoyed customers in the best way, this is life.
But as I said before, I have had business and personal dealing with Dell for nearly 20 years now, and I cannot find a large enough fault with them to slate them in the way you have. I would be a liar if I said some machines had never had a problem, but they have always been fixed really quickly.
I have a Dell Optiplex GX270 sat here number crunching, I bought it second hand from a construction company that was about to skip it as the Contract was complete, I gave a £50 donation to their pet charity. 3 months down the line this machine developed a serious fault, so I contacted Dell, gave them the express code, explianed that I had bought the machine, and had a reciept to prove it, the Motherboard had likely died and could I buy a new one, I was told "No Sir, you do not need to, the 3 year warranty is on the machine, not the owner of the machine, and as the warranty of only 11 months old we will be happy to repair the machine."
Somewhat taken abake, as I didn't expect this response even from Dell, I arranged collection. 5 days later it duly arrived back, and has been working ever since. And do you know what Dell did, they had no motherboards available for the machine spec I had, so they upgraded the motherboard and cpu from a 2.4 PIVA to a 2.8 PIVC (HT varient).
I have known Dell do some things to please business customers in the past, but this was the first time I had known them go to this length to please a domestic one. I'll grant you that over the years I have known Dell I have purchased over 40 machines from them, as a private individual or as a corporate buyer, perhaps that was the reason for the treatment, but I am loathe to accept it as the records would not have been linked to my knowledge.