From the few hundred I have had my hands on, Dells usually held up well and gave little if any trouble. Really old units had typical failures such as boards/power supplies/bad caps.
You can imagine the Dell customer service department...getting this complaint...then noting it’s a math department at a major university...so then they cook up this excuse of folks adding too many numbers and that screws up the computer.
I’m just curious if the Jack Daniels distillery had Dell computers and would call up the customer service folks with a similar complaint...would they suggest that alcohol is causing the Dell computer to screw up as well?
This is where you take the guy who made up this excuse and just let him go (don’t even fire the guy)...and make sure everyone knows what he did.
Somewhere about six years ago...you could see various Dell models having unique problems (their first “mini” would burn up the motherboard in twelve months, then you did the warranty replacement, and the second lasted roughly twelve months...the whole interior was just too hot and no air circulation was the culprit).
If my memory serves me, it was just a specific optiplex model.
I had similiar problems with compaq, they all failed at the same time.
My recent calls to Dell for warranty support were quite disappointing.