These days it seems everyone has at least one Dell horror story to convey. In my case, the tale involves an XPS M1710 notebook and an extended overseas trip. At first, all was well with my new Dell. Performance was top-notch and the ergonomics of the 17" screen made working with the unit quite pleasurable. Then my battery died. The unit was barely six months old, yet both the Dell BIOS "Battery Health" screen an These days it seems everyone has at least one Dell horror story to convey. In my case, the tale involves an XPS M1710 notebook and an extended overseas trip. At first, all was well with my new Dell. Performance was top-notch and the ergonomics of the 17″ screen made working with the unit quite pleasurable.Then my battery died. The unit was barely six months old, yet both the Dell BIOS “Battery Health” screen and Vista’s battery meter claimed it was on its last legs. Then the memory parity/NMI errors started cropping up. Removing one of the DDR2 modules seemed to fix the problem, but at a cost in lost performance (1GB really isn’t adequate for development work under Visual Studio and SQL Server). Finally, the LCD backlight went out. Depending on its mood and/or the position of the lid hinge, it would leave me staring at a dark screen with no supporting illumination.Normally, I would have nipped these issues in the bud by calling Dell support and having them honor their much ballyhooed “Next Business Day” onsite warranty. However, I was silly enough to actually take my Dell with me while travelling overseas to a country (Mauritius) small enough not to merit support coverage by Dell. And when I say “no coverage,” I mean literally no support of any kind, including that most basic of options, the “Parts Only Service” order (i.e. they ship you the parts; you fix it and ship back the defective ones). Apparently, Dell is a “global” company in name only. Pick the wrong destination and you’ll find yourself high-and dry. One support rep actually suggested I “fly to the nearby Seychelles Islands” in order to fix the unit – nice. In the end I simply had to limp along for nearly 4 months with a marginally functional system and no hope of a timely resolution. I took some comfort in the thought that, given the number of failures involved, and the level of grief they caused – plus my long history as a loyal Dell customer (currently on my fifth notebook from them) – they would no doubt offer to at least swap-out the system once I returned to the U.S. However, even this last bit of faith proved misplaced as the company’s outsourced support reps in Bangalore (yes, we know where you are) steadfastly refused to honor my request and stuck me instead with the aforementioned “Parts Only Service” option.Parts Only Service? For my POS Dell? Sounds like somebody’s trying to send me a message… (Hint: Next time, buy Lenovo). Software DevelopmentSmall and Medium Business