I need to share this horror story about buying a new laptop from Dell

So, who’s lying?

First off, pretty damn presumptuous to jump to "her partner" there.

She can't get work done because the sort of work she does requires a functioning computer with a decent graphics card.

The computer she was using for work prior to buying this laptop crapped out on her to a degree where it made more sense to buy a new one with better specs and sell the old one for parts.

She absolutely did, in fact, "note the return period" and "fucking return it." Dell just isn't honoring it.

She also has been attempting to get payments reversed, but as other people have been pointing out, banks and credit card companies do not in fact just hand over thousands of dollars out of the goodness of their hearts when someone gets defrauded, particularly in situations like this, where Dell strung her along for a bit by insisting they first take a shot at repairing the garbage they sent her, and then sending out an equally defective replacement.

You are correct that I did, in fact, do an image search result to look for a photo of a monitor displaying the same sort of garbage as hers. I'm not sure where you get "this story is fake" from that, particularly when in the same post I said "if I recall" with regard to whether in her case that was due to a failed display or failed video card. I did not, in fact, claim to have gone back in time to personally take a photo of lemon laptop #1.

I'm also a bit unclear what, exactly, you speculate I would stand to gain by publicly calling out a company for defrauding someone else? And I suppose, also coordinating something like a couple hundred people to share similar stories in the replies?

The only money changing hands here is hopefully Dell sending her the damn refund they owe her, and I don't need to convince them of anything. They already have 8 months of support logs.

I'm not sure what my Patreon has to do with Dell defrauding someone I care about. Did you have a point you were trying to make there that I'm missing?

Again, I'm not the person who got ripped off here. Nor am I married to her, which you seem to keep suggesting for some reason. I'm just sitting here, watching her get passed around between different support people for months like it's a 9-5 job and expressing my horror that any company would pull this sort of thing on anyone.

You really seem to have a lot of very strong opinions about some alternate situation that only exists in your mind.

She very much did contact Dell immediately on first receiving her lemon of a laptop to report that it arrived in a non-functional state. Dell then inspected it, agreed that it was non-functional, and (after dragging their feet for a while), sent her a replacement computer, which was also riddled with issues, which and which she also immediately reported as defective.

At no point has there ever been any dispute over the matter of whether she was sent non-functioning hardware, nor was there any point in here where she was given a window in which to report issues in which she failed to do so.

Furthermore, the initial laptop Dell sold her eight months ago came with a one year warranty, so even if she hadn't immediately gotten in touch about returning it, or it had been functioning at the time, they'd still be on the hook here.

There is no "old but working" laptop in this story.

She has not resold either of the defective laptops Dell has sent to her.

Lemon #2 is still in her possession, waiting for them to quit jerking her around, and send her a refund and a shipping label for it.

Lemon #1, so far as I know, was already sent back to a Dell warehouse last year, and is presumably awaiting the day they scam someone else by sending it out as a "refurbished replacement" for one of their other defective products.

The computer she had before buying Lemon #1 did not function, which is why she tried to buy a new laptop from Dell in the first place, has long-since been sold for parts, and is frankly not at all relevant to this conversation, not being something she paid good money for only to be defrauded by Dell like these.

Oh yes, while you have made it quite clear that you, for some reason, would enjoy looking at such, I did not take any photos nor record videos of that initial spectacularly defective laptop. For some reason I just did not have the foresight that 8 months later Dell still would not have issued a refund for it, and I might thusly be inclined to write a big long Twitter thread on the subject. You're not missing out on much though. Just picture a normal laptop, except the screen displays garbage, the fans kick into full gear like you're running a stress test the moment you start it up, and depending on the temperature in the room, the whole thing shuts down between ten minutes and a couple hours later.

Hopefully that resolves all of your questions, and you can now find something better to do with your time than accusing random strangers of imaginary crimes, and/or very suspiciously playing damage control for a profoundly shady company.

I've been building custom PCs for ~15 years and never had a worse experience than dealing with ASUS customer support.

The support/return culture is very different in the US vs Taiwan, where they're from -- they don't do returns there, it's just generally not a thing. Asus products sold in the US will be subject to retailer returns, but if you ever have to get corporate support directly from Asus, my experience is that it's hard to communicate and they don't have the same desire to please as the Western companies (at least Dell wants to LOOK like it cares; Asus doesn't really play that game because it's not part of their culture... they instead just try to make the hardware a bit better). Lenovo is a Chinese company, but they inherited the support culture from IBM, who they bought their computers division from.

But the thing is, most of the computers in the world are made from component parts produced by only a tiny handful of OEMs using reference designs, then put in different chasses and rebranded and whitelabeled. By the time it gets branded as any one particular company, mostly it's not the same people responsible for marketing or support as for the original integration engineering. i.e. it's not necessarily the case that any one "brand" actually has consistently good or bad hardware, it just depends on the sourcing for that one product line for any one production run, unless they are totally vertically integrated (and I don't think anyone is anymore, except maybe Samsung to a degree.)

So the support culture is more important than the actual hardware, IMO, and neither Asus nor Dell (consumer) excel in that regard.

But yes, you hit the nail on the head... unless you pay for business-class support (which is worth it, IMO), the only real support you'll get is from your retailer, not the manufacturer. Costco, Best Buy, and Amazon are all great for this. I get all my electronics from Best Buy these days because their return policy is great (60 days if you're part of their membership program, which also covers extended warranties and repairs) and it's so much easier to return things than at Costco (just because the lines are usually shorter, and you're dealing with tech people who understand what various components are... the average BB person at least knows more than the average Costco employee when it comes to tech).

Edit: I've had a lot of good luck with used laptops from Best Buy, which usually carry both a BB return policy (+ extended warranty if you're in their membership) and the original manufacturer's warranty, plus are much cheaper and also vetted/tested before resale.

Maybe they just cant afford it and have been struggling by on the half working device until now.