Dell's customer service is terrible. I had my harddrive die. My laptop was still under warranty, so I decided call Dell to get it fixed. After about 4 hours, I was able to get someone to start working on my case (I was transferred between departments 5 times, and only got someone to deal with the issue after I insisted that the previous person stay on the line until I did).<p>We than spent the next hour diagnosing the fact that it was, in fact, a broken harddrive. Although I told them this from the start, I can understand them wanting to verify this, but the we had found what seemed to be enough evidence that it was a broken HDD within the first 10 minutes, then just ran around in circles (I assume looking for a scripted error code that never showed up for some reason).<p>Once we were done, they agreed to send me a replacement drive, and I asked if it would be possible to upgrade the drive and pay for the difference. They then spent about half an hour looking up what HDD options were available. Once I decided which one I wanted, I was informed that I would be paying for the full price of the drive (but they could still send it instead of the free, non upgraded, one I was entitled to by warranty). I declined and asked for the free one.<p>Once that was done, as we were finalizing the shipping details, I was informed that I would need to send back my broken drive, which I was not willing to do. Eventually I agreed to just pay for a new drive (in retrospect, I should have hung up and bought the drive from another source). They sent me a drive and told me I would be receiving a bill.<p>The bill never came. Two weeks later, I called them again and spent another two hours trying to pay; before being told that I cannot pay because I have not been billed yet because I had not yet failed to return my broken drive in time. About a month after that, I get a voicemail from them about my failure to return my drive.<p>I try to call back, but due to ( I presume) time zone differences I never managed to reach them during office hours, so I just got to voice mail where I had to leave a message asking them to call me back. Despite this, I still had to wait through about half an hour of holding to get a line to the voicemail. After going through this dance a few times, I just asked them to email me the bill, after which point I payed them the $70 for the hard drive.