Today has just been horrible. Absolutely freaking horrible. In general, I love Dell. I've spent maybe 10k there in the last few years. In general, everything runs fine. About a year ago I bought a XPS laptop. A gamers laptop. This laptop was awesome. It was even better than my desktop (until I upgraded two months ago). The only thing lacking a bit was the battery. If I had known then what I knew now - I'd have bought another system. It's not that the system is bad, I just don't play as many PC games as I used too. That being said - I would have gone lighter with a longer battery life.

Anyway - the system would last about an hour and a half on battery, which isn't terrible for a powerhouse like that. Over the last two months or so, the battery has slowly degraded. It stopped charging to a hundred percent, and only gave me about 50 minutes on battery. For the heck of it, I decided to see if I could upgrade the battery. Turns out, they did have a newer battery with more power. I called Dell to confirm it would work on my XPS. (I'm a bit of a hardware dummy.) He not only confirmed that it would work, he said I would get 8 hours of battery life. Yes.... 8 hours. I suppressed snicker and told him that he was simply wrong, but that I'd be happy with a quarter of that.

The battery came in yesterday. I let it charge - and viola - no improvement. In fact, it seems to have almost the exact same duration.

So - after dropping close to two hundred bucks I'm a bit miffed. I called Dell this morning. I explained the situation to the support rep. I was put on hold. After 5 minutes I heard a beep and I was transferred. This is where Hell began.

For the next two hours, I was transferred four times. Each time I was sent to the wrong queue. At the last mistransfer, I demanded a manager. The manager said they even they can't bypass the hold lines, but that he would wait with me on hold. After 20 more minutes, he apolgized and said that the wait times must be extra long today. He took down my number and promised he would call me.

How many of my readers think I'll actually get a call?

If I wasn't so happy with my dual-core system, I'd return it. As it stands, I can't return my laptop (as far as I know). The thing is - I've spent a lot of money with Dell. In fact, my company only buys Dell. Of course, that may change now...