It took Dell 18 months before they admitted that the reason my laptop kept freezing was a bad hard drive. I went through all the pain you did and more. There’s an old aphorism that businesses don’t lose customers by making mistakes, they lose them by not fixing the mistakes. Dell proved it to me. We’d probably have five Dells instead of Macs if they’d just fixed my problem quickly and efficiently.
I’m sitting here on a Dell Dimension 8200. Whenever I have needed to call Dell for computer assistance, I doubt that I have ever spoken to an American. That said, these support personnel always appear to me to be looking at a flow chart on their end of the line. “If the customer’s computer does this, tell them to try this.” That’s not the kind of help I am looking for at that point. I’d like to know that the support person assigned to me is a thinker and not sitting in a New Delhi cubicle reading some novel, in between my working through each step in their flow chart manual.