I would like to share an experience I've had with Dell Technical Support over the past month.   On August 22 I turned on my Dimension 4300 and I received numerous error messages.  The error messages were mostly .DLL not found.  Prior to this my system was running perfectly.     This along with other error messages persisted over the next several days.  I called Dell Technical support and was told first I had the Sasser virus.  While I was relatively certain this wasn't the case I followed the instructions of the Tech who had me attempt to remove the virus.  When I downloaded the removal tool as instructed a message poped up "no virus found".  The tech didn't know what to do so he transferred me to someone else.  What happened was I was put into the que again for the next Tech to pick me up.  This person insisted I needed to do a system restore.  I did the system restore with no resolution.  I was then told I would be called back after I completed this step, which never occurred.  I called back the next day when I was told I needed to re-install XP.  I resisted and pushed for some diagnostics to be done.  Reluctantly I had a tech who was willing to run 1 diagnostic on my memory since one of the first error messages I recieved indicated a problem with memory.  I didn't write it down unfortuneately.   After that though I did begin to write down all the messages.  The diagnostics found nothing wrong with the memory.

I continued to have problems included now crashing on start up.  It was so bad that many times it would take up to 30 minutes to get the computer to boot up.  The saga continued with a reluctant reinstallation of XP and formatting my hard drive.  After the installation was down to the last 12 minutes my computer locked up. The next person I spoke with indicated my XP disc was bad and they would ship me another one.  Several days later that disc arrived and again I attempted to reinstall XP.  This time it made it to the 3 minutes left mark before locking up.  Again I was told I would be called back and it didn't happen.   The tech person who I made contact with indicated my hard drive was bad after a few tests.  I promptly went to Best Buy and purchased a hard drive.  I reattempted installing XP only to find it still wouldn't load.  I called technical support back again and was told by yet another person my new hard drive was bad and further since I didn't purchase it from Dell they would not provide additional support. 

By this time I was very frustrated and made contact with someone who could provide real technical support (not from Dell).  After some detective work, and looking at the error messages I had written down.  He indicated I most likely had a problem with my physical memory.  Sure enough I went out and purchased a stick of ram and my problems went away.  One month and 3 days later and no thanks to any of the Dell technical support folks I was able to resolve my issues. 

The moral of this story is that Dell technical support can't resolve technical issues beyond system restore and reinstallation of XP.