About 2 weeks ago September 18, I was raving about Dell's service, but now............... A few days earlier about the 13th, I had sent my sons laptop in for repair, missing #4 key, screen had bad pixels, etc. well now the service on it has been lacking at best, and I paid for the best warranty they had called Complete Care I think. They sent a box to ship the system back in, which I did the same day I received the box. They called and said the system could not be repaired and they were sending a replacement system. A couple days later like the 17th, we received one that is part my sons original system, with parts of another similar system. There are four keys missing and it has stickers all over the case of the laptop. I called them and they said we were still going to get a replacement system but that they had to build it, and it would be 8-10 days. It has been longer than that so I called them again this morning. First thing the person tells me is that we were shipped the replacement system over 2 weeks ago. I explained to him that we had received a cannibalized system that was in worse shape than the one we had sent in for repair and then after being on hold while he checked on that he tells me that they are still building the new system and it will be another 3-4 days.
I think they are full of it and wish I had some way of contacting someone in Texas instead of wherever I am being transferred to. Their customer service for individuals sucks and worthy of a lawsuit if anything is.

You should kick this up in management since they sent you a piece of crap probably to clear their backorder list. I'd go ballistic if someone did that to me. When we had ordered a laptop a couple of years ago, it took near a month to ship and that was when I had threatened them with cancellation and they patched me through to a floor manager in their plant. They must have cut their inventory drastically since all the troubles began.

Yeah. If you actually go to there site now and try and place an order for a configured system (Dell built) it will still take almost a month before the "estimated ship date". If you start adding stuff then that gets bumped up to almost 2 months. I want to get a laptop from them but I don't want to wait two months before it will actually be shipped. I think I am just going to purchase locally on this one.

I went to the Dell forum, what a joke.......... you can't submit a post with words like sucks, or lawsuit LOL
Michael Dell if you are listening..............Customer Service buddy that is why you are losing market share, your companies, customer service

I have to admit, Dell is still my favorite provider of prebuilt computers. My trick is to not rely on their service. Sadly, that may not be possible if you have a laptop from Dell.

I purchased an HP mid-tower for a friend and I opened it to look inside. I was shocked. Not only does HP still use the ATX form factor that requires more air movement to keep cool, but they also didn't organize the cables at all. It looks like a teenage kid put the components in and just let the wires dangle. One of the Molex power cables was less than an inch away from the processor fan blade.

Dell computers have always looked perfect inside, with cables strapped down and everything in its place. Also Dell uses the BTX form factor in their mid-tower cases which only requires 1 120mm fan at the front of the PC to keep it cool (except the video card fan).

But, when I buy a computer from Dell, I get nothing more than the standard warranty and I am prepared to spend money if something goes wrong and with the money I save I can use if something breaks down. With their warranties being so expensive, I have saved money by not purchasing them.

I just find it hard to take that after he spent around $2000 for the laptop and then I paid $360 for the Complete Care warranty which is suppose to cover everything including if you spill something on the laptop that they would deal with us like they are. I have never felt so violated as I have dealing with them at this time.

Take pictures of the s$%#ty laptop and send them to Dell (and post them here).

Unfortunately you are caught in what is better know as "Corporate Red Tape".
Dell and gateway and any other discounted, completely proprietary business unit will pull the same stunts. They have paper back up to confirm their actions, now its on you to prove otherwise and they count on the fact that most people in the consumer end will not be prepared to go to the legths, up to and including legal action, to settle a dispute.

I have a Dell D620 laptop that is company issued that has been in several times and returns with the same issue, SLOW!!!!!

Stick with the mainstream manufacturers, yes they cost more but you get waht you py for.

Lenovo, probably the best laptop you can buy. And if it would happen to break (haven't seen it happen much), I haven't heard much of anything as far as bad customer service.

As for Dell, consumer customer service is absolutely horrid almost all the time, except for at school where we had Dell certified technicians that could do all warranty work and order parts and such for Dells, so it was walk up and get the problem fixed, which was really nice. My girlfriend has a dell laptop that needed a battery replaced under the battery replacement recall a little bit ago. It's now so dead that you can't unplug it for more than a second or the system dies due to lack of power, she has complete care, but batteries are not covered under it, and the old battery's warranty was applied to the new battery, so it couldn't be replaced as the old battery that was still working fine would be about 2 yrs old. it has had consistent issues but Dell refuses to replace the system despite it having 3 motherboards and several fans put in it already this year. They are horrible with customer service, and I doubt I'll ever buy one for myself because of that.