IME Dell treat their home customers and their corporate customers very differently. Consider the effects on Dell of Dell losing the US Govt as a customer.
It’s not stated what actually happenned, but in Tomndebb’s case, I’d have pointed out that my PC was still under warranty and if a new PC were required to fix the problem then I would expect Dell to honour the warranty by sending me that new PC FOC within the period stipulated by the warranty.
But I’m a bit of a bastard. 
Pretty much. Job related issues combined with the short remaining time on the warranty rendered a long fight with Dell impractical, so I found a newer, faster, motherboard/cpu/power unit combo for less than $200 and installed it the next day. Dell just saved themselves a cheap power unit and cost themselves several whole unit sales (and some bad publicity whenever they are mentioned in my presence) for the forseeable future.
(Actually, with only six weeks left on warranty, I’d have almost been willing to cut them some slack and just bought a power unit. It was discovering that no power unit would fit their motherboard and that they refused to tell me where I could find a replacement or adapter (as in, “I cannot give you that information” not “We don’t know either”) that they lost any hope of a repeat purchase.)
My Dell also had a proprietary way of connecting the motherboard to the case. I love Dell, I’ve had no problem with their customer service ever - but while I’ll keep buying laptops from them, I’m sick of this proprietary stuff and will be building my own desktops from now on.
Interesting about the proprietary connection scheme. I had no idea. Sorry for your troubles, tom.
As for my own troubles, I guess it’s true that if at first subtlety doesn’t work, hit it until it does work. I received my new CD/DVD drive yesterday and installed it last night. Everything seems to work fine.
As Quartz said, though, it ight have been a product of this being a US government account as much as anything else.