'Bout four years ago I bought a pretty nice Alienware for ~$2200. The salesman I placed the order with was on the phone immediately when I called to place the order, and no-where to be found by phone or email after I placed the order but before the system shipped. Mildly annoying, but the system arrived three weeks later and all was well. Then a year later the fan on the video card started failing. I called Alienware and after confirming that I was still under warranty they offerered to send me the replacement card that was retailing for $350 then. They took my credit card number as security that I would send the defective card back after installing the replacement.
The replacement never arrived. After two weeks I started emailing and calling Alienware with only vague assurances from outsourced support operators that my card was on the way. After three weeks I began to become a PITA and finally got transferred to a supervisor who provided me with a tracking number. Lo and behold, the card had been delivered a week and a half prior. To South Carolina... Calling back I got said supervisor back on the phone who proceeded to dance around whether they had actually shipped my card to the wrong address or he had just given me a random tracking number to get me off the phone. Instead he assured me that my card would be arriving in the mail within a week. It did. It worked great and I mailed back the defective card, a decidedly satisfied customer. When my CC statement came two weeks later with no charges I stopped keeping track of the USPS tracking number of the RMA'ed card, a very educational mistake for me.
A month later my next CC statement came. Suprise, a $350 charge from Alienware. I called them back and inquired why I had been charged for this warranty repair. I was informed that since they never recieved the RMA'd card for the new one they sent out, I "purchased" the new one. A supervisor happily told me that without the USPS tracking number from a month and a half prior to confirm delivery to Alienware, he couldn't help me, despite how much he wanted to, of course.
So the warranty cost me $350 bucks. To this day, I still wonder if they actually didn't recieve the defective card I shipped, or I was charged for the one sent to South Carolina.
Oh, and no, I would NEVER buy from Alienware again. Ever. Instead, I spent another $2000 at Newegg last year and hand built my newest system.