No question, I’d be done with Dell.
I bought a Dell desktop from Costco.com. Had the thing delivered right to my home. No issues so far with the hardware. The security software, on the other hand…
They still are business class.
I’m gonna suggest that you don’t look at a custom made model and try to find one that’s already made. That’s where this thing went awry and your expectations weren’t met. That is all on Dell for not managing your expectations.
Unfortunately a lot of this stuff is going to be based on individual experiences and everyone can have a bad event. Still in my experience, the Dell outlet center is run the way the main site (custom builds) should run, if it could. You pick your machine, you pay them, the machine arrives in 3 days and you even save some dough. You have a problem, they send you a box, you sent it to them and they fix it.
You can find pretty much any spec you want there, but you have to look for it. Okay, it may be hot pink or green; but it’ll be there in 3 days. If you had indicated a desire to charge back the original purchase, I would have recommended that as an option.
Honestly, I think if you had gone that route; you would have had a different experience, but now the tree is posioned for you.
That doesn’t excuse anything that Dell did as far as customer service, they really screwed the pooch on this; especially the cancellation.
Wow, I have to say that we’ve never had problems with Dell, and their customer service was always spot on. We’ve purchased three desk systems and one laptop from them. The computers always arrived early, never late.
All that being said, our last purchase was over two years ago and it was the laptop for our daughter (in prep for college). She had some performance issues with it, but they sent someone right out to fix it.
On the other hand, I think I’ll keep all the above in mind when it’s time to order a laptop for our son.