I had a similar (though less expensive) experience with Dell, after buying an XPS desktop for home use to mostly act as a Photoshop machine. They were kind enough to "upgrade" me to faster hard drives as the ones I had originally ordered were no long available. What they didn't check was whether the disk controller on the motherboard actually worked with the operating system they supplied. Turns out there's a long standing issue between Vista and some types of Intel disk controllers which causes them to blue screen randomly.
Anyway, to cut a long set of telephone calls short, although they offered to do replacements of practically everything (they'd even let me do replacements myself for some parts rather than sending out an engineer, that's how much detail I was giving them) they didn't acknowledge the key issue - that the system configuration was wrong to start with.
In the end, I bought a new disk controller, installed it myself and everything has been happy for the last four years. I did learn two things from the experience: the freephone support line you get when you buy an XPS system is well worth the slight price increase (I think I was on the phone for over 4 hours in total), and you should always aim to phone the Dell support line when the Canadian call centre is on, as they are by far the most knowledgeable, helpful and understandable. By contrast the European call centre was well-meaning but to constrained by their support "scripts" and the Indian call centre never wanted to admit that I might have a problem even if the diagnostics didn't report one.
I had a similar (though less
I had a similar (though less expensive) experience with Dell, after buying an XPS desktop for home use to mostly act as a Photoshop machine. They were kind enough to "upgrade" me to faster hard drives as the ones I had originally ordered were no long available. What they didn't check was whether the disk controller on the motherboard actually worked with the operating system they supplied. Turns out there's a long standing issue between Vista and some types of Intel disk controllers which causes them to blue screen randomly.
Anyway, to cut a long set of telephone calls short, although they offered to do replacements of practically everything (they'd even let me do replacements myself for some parts rather than sending out an engineer, that's how much detail I was giving them) they didn't acknowledge the key issue - that the system configuration was wrong to start with.
In the end, I bought a new disk controller, installed it myself and everything has been happy for the last four years. I did learn two things from the experience: the freephone support line you get when you buy an XPS system is well worth the slight price increase (I think I was on the phone for over 4 hours in total), and you should always aim to phone the Dell support line when the Canadian call centre is on, as they are by far the most knowledgeable, helpful and understandable. By contrast the European call centre was well-meaning but to constrained by their support "scripts" and the Indian call centre never wanted to admit that I might have a problem even if the diagnostics didn't report one.