DELL worthless warranty Internet

A HUMOROUS STORY
1. One of the hard disks in my 3 year old DELL went bad so I ordered a replacement disk. (58 dollars, delivered).
2. A day later I got an e-mail saying this type of disk was on back-order and would ship in about 2 weeks.
3. Two days later the disk is delivered to my home.
4. I didn't put it in that day and the very next day a letter arrives from DELL telling me that my warranty would expire in a month and wouldn't I like to pay about 250 dollars for an extended warranty? That the computer was still under warranty seemed like the ever elusive free lunch! So I contacted dell-support, explained the issue, which I am pretty certain the tech did NOT understand, and was passed off to customer-care.
5. A contacted customer-care on a Friday so I was fairly certain they wouldn't respond in a timely manner so I replaced the hard drive and restored the RAID 1 mirroring. (The good new is that the DELL manuals --if you can find where they are hidden among all the junk they load on your system-- are pretty good. The RAID manager was from INTEL and their web-site has good instructions on restoring RAID arrays.)
6. Today customer-care responds that they cannot do anything except have me ship the disk back. I quess they want to send their techs out with a replacement disk and install it? I was momentarily tempted to send them the old bad disk but better judgement prevailed.
7. Needless to say I don't think I will give them about $250 for an extended warranty.
LESSONS LEARNED ( in over 40 years working with computers)
A. The companies are now competing on PRICE. In any given year the company will have a few percent of their customers so irate with them that they leave. But the same is true for their competitors -- look at the RIP-OFF reports for the other companies. They just swap their irate customers. Incidently this isn't limited to computer companies -- have you ever tried to get any "service" company to fix THEIR foul-ups?
B. Forget "tech support". If you can read go to the trouble of actually reading the documentation they provide. I know a lot of it is nearly hopeless jargon but with the aid of search engines you can get through most of it-- and you will be more knowledgable than their "techs", who are just reading it themselves. This will require at least 20 hours of HARD work. If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
C. Warranties-- just assume what you buy is "as is". Most computer stuff is amazingly reliable. Plan on fixing it yourself (if you can) OR plan on using some local tech shop and paying. Remember you may not "get what you pay for" but for sure will not get what you didn't pay for. You did shop on price didn't you?
D. Do NOT buy anything with a DEBIT card. USE the "shop-safe" or similar option on your credit card -- if you don't know what this is you need a new credit-card company! I do a one-time card through Pay_Pal whenever I can. And by the way, even on a credit card anything for under $50 is of no interest to your card company -- see A above.

Tom-ca
livermore, California
U.S.A.