A fellow abused Dell customer here just tyring to help you unravel the maze of the miserable Dell customer service and support.

Sounds like you are in an unfortunate situation.  Perhaps the following will help you understand the run-around you have been given and give you some ideas on what you choose to do next.

You have the option to return your purchase in 14 days from the original ship date (as far as I know).

Other than that you can have it repaired under warranty.  However the warranty may not be something you expect.  The warranty requires a lot of your time and participation.  When you have a problem with a system you have to contact technical support.  This can be done via email, chat, or telephone.  Telephone is usually your best bet as email and chat is miserably slow.  The technician will ask you to do things according to a problem resolution script that he is required to follow.  This can be incredibly frustrating as many questions appear so mundane and stupid they feel downright insulting.  But you have to play along if you want them to honor their warranty.  You see they will only service a machine after the problem has been identified, and that process involves you at your computer following instructions of the tech that is on the telephone.  Since the computer is comprised of both hardware and software they may ask you to run hardware diagnostics to make sure there is nothing wrong with the hardware.  If there is a hardware problem they may dispatch either a part for you to replace yourself or an on-site technician who will come with the part and install it for you.  If the problem is software they almost always tell you to restore the machine back to factory default settings and try again...  this is the easy way for them to wash their hands of the problem and get you off of the phone rather than taking the time consuming measure of pinpointing the software problem and addressing it.  The problem with resetting a system back to the factory settings is that it wipes your system of all of your data and of all of the software that you installed.  And since most software requires activation with the use of serial numbers you may have another problem ahead of trying to reinstall that software again unless you first uninstall it before resetting the system back to factory defaults.

If you are inexperienced in troubleshooting software or installing an operating system then it is by and large cheaper to just buy a new computer than troubleshoot and problematic one.  But to get Dell to honor their warranty this is what they require that you do.

Only after you have had three major repairs performed on a particular system will they offer a replacement unit.  And that is only if you make a big stink about it.

I understand that if you return it outright you are probably not going to get the original sale price again, but you have to consider how much your time is worth.  It sounds like you already wasted a bunch of time and have nothing to show for it.  And you will have to spend more time with tech support before you begin to get to the bottom of the issue.

I can't post the email address of Michael Dell because the forum has rules in place that seem to be designed to make it nearly impossible for customers to find a solution to legitimate problems, but if you google "email addresses for dell consumerist" you will find a bunch of address that you might want to write.

Unfortunately not only is the sales, customer service, and technical support all run by non-American speaking people but so is the escalations team that responds to emails sent to Mr. Dell.  Pittiful!

Good luck getting your issue resolved.

ps. you should also check your system for the certificate security problem that Dell shipped with most systems since last August that I describe in my post here:: 

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/virus-spyware/f/3522/t/19663411

Welcome to Dell.  They are fine until something goes wrong hardware-wise, now you are screwed.