One of my childhood computers was a Dell 486. My first laptop was a Dell Pentium II. I’ve had many other Dells since, but they did me dirty on the XPS 15 9560 I bought in 2018.

It’s was a beautiful machine, but within months of purchasing it, it started overheating and shutting down under heavy load. I’m fairly certain it was a thermal management design flaw for that particular year and model, and that Dell knew it and was determined to not replace any of them.

Instead, they spent probably several multiples of what the device cost sending techs to my house to replace the mobo (which had the CPU and GPU soldered on) no less than half a dozen times. They also made me mail it back to them for a few weeks. This went on for literally three years until the warranty was up and they washed their hands of me.

Ultimately, nothing fixed the issue. I had to permanently underclock it to prevent overheating. So, I had three years of issues, a company that wouldn’t replace their defective product and instead put me through the wringer, and I was left with a computer was incapable of operating at the specs advertised when I bought it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever buy another Dell, but they ate up most of the good will I had for them with that debacle.