2013 17R SE Windows 8 - nightmare - help?

I purchased this laptop a year ago with a two year warranty and all the "service" from Dell. This is my tenth or eleventh computer from Dell over the years. I had heard that the quality had dropped, but have been loyal to Dell. I am seriously having concerns now. When the new, large screen laptop I purchased arrived, it immediately had problems which required me to spend no less than three hours on the phone with Dell's support to download and install additional programs to make the laptop work correctly. Since Dell was not available the first night I had it, I had about a ten pound shiny new paperweight just out of the box. This should have been my first clue. For the next year, the laptop would periodically froze on boot and do nothing - requiring two to three boot sequences before it finally gets to the windows screen. Or it will lag for substantial periods of time - which happened often. I never could be sure which without waiting for a few minutes. In March or so of this year, I finally got tired of going through this and called Support for what I knew would be a looooong call. I was not disappointed. After two hours (at least) of going through the customer support playbook (she took control of my machine, but numerous restarts were required. Ultimately, no fix was found and the well-meaning support person created a new account in windows on the laptop with me. Amazingly, the change seemed to resolve the issue for about a month or so, then the lag started again AND/OR the freeze at startup. Yesterday, Windows updated. My Dell crashed. It now will not go past the "Dell" screen, except to occasionally go to the blue screen which tells you that it had not shut down properly and gives you several potions. If instructed to go forward with startup of 8.1, it freezes. The cursor works, but the ENTIRELY GRAY SCREEN has nothing upon which to click. After another two hours with Dell Support last night and today - here is THEIR solution. Not wanting to inconvenience me (and definitely not wanting to spend time finding the problem), they are sending me a disk for which I will now wait for two days. At that time, I get to WIPE MY LAPTOP under their instruction and install whatever is on the wonder disk they are sending. I asked if I will lose my information and was told - the computer is not working now, so I won't lose anything. I will, however, have to reinstall everything, of course. OH...and I have been ASSURED that this will fix the problem. They are going to put a spiffy, BRAND NEW version of WINDOWS 8 on my machine. (They said nothing of 8.1, which makes me wonder what happens when I have to spend the additional time reinstalling 8.1 and what impact that will have on my spiffy, brand new Windows 8.1). I tell my tale of woe in a quest that someone who knows computers better than I will provide a little aid. Dell's solution, it appears, is simply wipe and reinstall. I am also very concerned that this will not solve the problem, as I have seen others speaking of this problem as well. I do not want to be on an endless repair mission. Does anyone know if this is just the Dell brand laptop or this model that has this problem? OR is it Windows 8? I simply want something that works and is not slower and more tempermental than my six year old tower - which my laptop has been. Should I even stick with Dell at this point?