I'll start off by saying: I WORK at DELL (Nashville). I work in Gold Tech Support, though now more commonly known as ProSupport. We only support businesses/Govt./HIED/ect in our group. I've been with the company for 3yrs now and own 7 of our systems (4 xps, 1 latitude, 2 insipiron).

As others have said.. you do get what you pay for- you buy a cheap/cheaper system, don't expect great reliability on the parts.. or not as much as you would on one of our other systems. IMO with our systems, if you want to do multiboxing.. I wouldn't bother with anything but an xps of if you really have some money to spend, a precision workstation (but really, you dont need dual xeons and 164gb memory support to multibox).

So if what you bought was like say... a Vostro (which is like an inspiron only painted black), or a Dimension system... I wouldn't expect great gaming, reliable parts, nor fantastic upgrade options out of it.

And to the alienware comments.. I dunno who/where you got your info from that we're stopping the xps line... last I looked on the development pages.. we're still pushing those out...

One other note I'd suggest. I you do buy a DELL, get a warranty, especially if you bought one of the lower end systems. I feel sorry for the people I have to tell that they don't have a current contract and they've gotta pay for their parts replacements &/or tech support. Granted most of you may/maynot need tech support.. but do yourself a favor.. fake having a business (say, self employed).. and get yourself a gts/pro support contract/warranty.. otherwise after that 1yr after your purchase date, not only are you out of warranty, but all of your support is overseas... so if you *do* need a part replaced.. you've gotta deal with non-native english speeking persons, who have scripted questions/responses.

It's not even close to like that where I work- *sigh* It's really awesome *sigh* I love it there......