I posted the last entry at 12:31:02 this afternoon, a few minutes after my laptop took it's last breath, I switched the keyboard over to this computer and powered it up.

I went to Dell's support site after messing around looking up the stop code and disassembling the laptop and checking for any looe connections,and started a support ticket. I filled out the form and said:

This morning I noticed that Windows crashed a few times  then I heard this terrible grinding noise. the grinding noise slowed and stopped and then I got a blue screen of death. I turned the unit over and the fan was still spinning so with a sinking heart I realized the noise was coming from the hard drive. I shut the machine off and restarted it and it would not boot  Primary Hard Drive 0 was not found. I would like to claim this under my Complete Care warranty and have it replaced. I am currently in the Cayman Islands on business and won't be back in Florida for a couple months. Can I get the part replaced through a local service center?

I had a copy of it emailed to me, timestamped at 1:19PM. I got an automated response that my ticket was received at 1:21 PM that said that due to the current congestion I would get a response from a technician in an average of 2 minutes 51 seconds. It took them an hour, but that's still pretty good, and it's a Saturday. At 2:22 I got an email from Ashish at Dell Tech Support:

Sir, after going through all the information provided by you, I came to
the conclusion that hard disk drive of your system need to be replaced.
As per our records your system is under warranty and the hard disk drive of your system can be replaced. To help me in arranging a replacement of faulty part for your system, please provide verification of the following information:

and asked me for an address and phone number to ship out a new drive overnight, as per my warranty details. I responded with my physical address here in Cayman, and hopefully anew drive will show up on Tuesday or Wednesday next week (there really is no such thing as overnight to here... they call it International Priority and charge $35 for up to 15 sheets of paper in their envelope, and it takes a day, sometimes three)

This is the 4th Dell laptop I've bought since 1998, and getting treated like this is one of the reasons I'm a repeat customer. I've read horror stories about people who have just a BITCH of a time with Tech Support but every time I've dealt with Dell tech support, whether they had a Texan or Indian accent, I've been treated decently and promptly every time.