Last year I had purchased a new laptop and went with Dell. Some would choose to argue with me to say there may be better options but ultimately I am all about support. The laptop that I bought was pretty beefy and the only complaint that I had with it was Vista (which I am getting used to - sorry MS but it is not XP in stability, etc.).

 We started having issues with the laptop and went through the standard troubleshooting steps and reloaded everything which worked for a while. All this was worked through support. When we had the issue again I used the same steps and recovered again now very suspicious of what was going on. Finally it happened a third time and we performed some further troubleshooting with Dell to determine that we indeed had a bad hard drive. A new one was overnighted to us with our standard image already installed and I was able to get it swapped out and running within 1.5 hours.

Sadly, a couple of weeks later we had another failure. While we had most of our stuff backed up on the first one, the second failure caught us a little off guard and I am hoping still to recover some pictures and videos that I downloaded of my children. So, here is where I come to the crux of the support issue. I really didn't want to go through the standard channel of support to reload again and then perform the same basic steps of troubleshooting. I did those myself and found that the same bad drive flag was being set again. At this point I wanted my laptop fixed. Now, some would think that because Dell is so big that they would not be able to adequately respond to situtations like mine but that is not true. I simply submitted an email ticket with my old ticket information asking for my case to be escalated and it was. I did use some kind of strong statements about "losing confidence in support if I had to walk through standard channels" etc but they were sincere statements. Regardless though, Dell answered. That is what makes them great IMHO. 

I'm not submitting this to pat Dell on the back although they deserve it, but rather encouraging us to consider the support we provide in a similar way. Are we able to handle support like this and escalate easily when there is a need. To me it is amazing that they have the capability to do that and from what I have experienced they do it efficiently.

....and I will be getting a "new" laptop here in about a week to take care of my old one. Should have begged them for XP to be installed as well. :)