My friend ordered a Dell by phone and, after setting it up, couldn't get the
Internet to come up. I had a look at the invoice to make sure she had all the
required components. A modem was on the list, with the comment "not requested."
Would you, in this scenario, have specifically stated, "Oh, by the way, be sure
to include a modem"? Imagine shipping a computer in 2005, complete with Windows,
Norton antivirus, and misc. bundled Windows-specific software without including
a modem -- or even questioning that fact! Their ads imply that a techie will
"personally" see that you get the custom computer you desire. Yeah, right. At
the very least the techie should have a checklist of items to ask about, such
as, "What speed modem would you like?" The solution? They sent her the missing
modem, which my friend had to pay someone to install (she's not hardware-savvy).
I told her she should have insisted they replace the cpu in full configuration,
but they gave her some song-and-dance and she capitulated. I swore I would never
consider buying anything from Dell after that.

By comparison, in my own experience, I bought an IBM computer from a magazine
ad special. They honored their two-year warranty when the monitor failed 18
months later, no questions asked. They shipped a new monitor in two days and I
sent the broken one back to them by return UPS. Can't do much better than that!