My laptop developed a problem with the power supply a few days back, it was constantly disconnecting and leaving me on battery even though the plug was in correctly. The guy I spoke to yesterday on on the phone diagnosed it as a motherboard fault and said a technician would be out today to fix it up, keep in mind I'm like 300KM from the nearest city likely to have a Dell service centre.
The guy shows up today on time and was all equipped for the job but then he agreed with the diagnosis I came to last night that it was the cable from the power supply and so arranged for me to get a replacement TOMORROW. I was all prepared to send the machine away and be computerless until next year but even with an incorrect diagnosis, it's fixed in 2 days.
HP's customer support has earned my ire, Dell's has earned a serious amount of my respect. Considering I'm likely to have influence over hardware procurement when I get a job, I think I'm going to be fighting for Dell...

I'm mixed on DELL, but happy with the end results.
Had to phone them up a few times over the last few years, only to have them either; hang up on me mid call, pass the problem around from person to person at their end, have barely passable English and sometimes, they just don't know what they are doing.
I've managed to find a few people who are in the very-good to excellent in those areas and request them when I can, but they're not always available.
The people they send out though? Quick 24 hour service, Always on time, have all the parts they need and more, are friendly and highly knowledgeable. Can certainly also recommend them for that.
HP? manage to be worse at all those things. Unfortunately, they have a lot of the current contracts and we have to deal with them for the next year. grrr :)

I guess it comes down to who you get on the other end of the phone/email. I've only ever come across one helpful person at dells tech support the rest of the time my experiance is much more like Ois, being passed around the phone or people with an accent I can barely understand. They have never sent someone out to fix it but they do send a courier to pickup the delivery at their expense which is nice.

Let me reiterate my experience with Dell Support from a couple of years back, in chronological order:
1. I order a PC (laptop) on their webpages.
2. After a few days, expected delivery time for my PC is set to about three weeks later. Fair enough.
3. The delivery address was wrong in the confirmation email, despite the fact that I had corrected it BEFORE I ordered.
4. I find it impossible to change the delivery address on the order via their webpages.
5. I discover support for norwegian private customers does not even exist, and at first I am unable to reach anyone that can help.
6. After repeated calls and much waiting I am finally patched through to their norwegian corporate support, where I am finally able to change my delivery address. The person I talk to confirms the delivery date and states that my PC should arrive before or on that date, no problem.
7. A few days before the expected delivery, the date is updated. This time the expected delivery is set to over a month after the first date!
8. I call their support to check on this, and talk to a person who is convinced it must be some mistake, and promises to check it out and call me back. He never does.
9. I call again a couple of days later and talk to a different person. He promises to elevate my case, so that the person assigned to my case will call me back sometime during the day. I receive a grand total of zero calls.
10. I call, yet again, the following day, this time to cancel the whole order because I am fucking fed up with their bullshit. I meet yet another new person, who states how disappointed he is with his colleague, and also that the delivery date I have been given cannot be correct. He says that he'll now take over my case and promises to call me back with some info in just a few hours. Naturally, he never calls back.
11. I call back after another couple of days, and have to listen to the same person tell me exactly the same he told me two days ago; that he's now taking over the case and will call be back ASAP. Obviously, I should have raged pretty hard at him, but by this time I am so perplexed and jaded by their sheer level of complete incompetence that I just say "sure, OK" and hang up. He does, unsurprisingly, not call me back.
12. I call their sales department for fun and enquire as to the delivery time of the same machine that I had ordered over three weeks prior. The salesperson promises 2-3 weeks, however he very quickly got interested in ending the call when I asked why the machine I had ordered should then take 8 weeks to finish and send out to me.
I will never even consider beginning to think about looking at another Dell product, ever again.

Some hardware manufacturers have next to no presence in the countries they sell to. This can cause no end of problems as you clearly already know. But the fact that it was so poor does make me wonder how they're maintaining a presence in Norway at all.

Dell, meh. They give a lot of goodwill, but their indian call center irritates me to no end. I find it hilarious that the pinnacle of indsutrialism is foreign call centers. So eventually, all non-trades people will work either at Wal Mart, or in a call center, delivering customer service to other call center/wal mart employees for their purchases.
PS, if you get India when you call Dell, hang up and try again, you might get their other center in Texas.

I've noticed a BIG difference between business support and home support for DELL products.
Business=Never had an issue (although mabye once or twice a year you can never get through to support)
Home= I dread when a user brings their personal laptop in and I have to call Dell.

Join the club.
A couple years ago my wife's computer had a video card issue. No big deal, things like that happens. Even though I knew since the beginning what was the problem, my wife had to stay 7 hours (5 hours on saturday + 2 hours the next day) on the phone with the tech support. And when they finally agreed that the video card was the problem, they sent somebody to install the new video card, but that guy barely knew what he was doing, I had to do it myself.
No complain about the hardware though.

The hardware is my main complaint. We went through 3 sets of wireless keyboard/mouse combos, had the Stack replaced twice, and the motherboard is going now.

With Dell, its all about the level of support you got when you purchased your system. The basic level, pretty much only over the phone diagnosis and ship to repair centers, essentially sucks, but that is true of nearly every support system like that, regardless of the manufacturer. Their upper level (XPS) and corporate support... I'm surprised they don't bring me a cup of coffee and rub my feet while they diagnose and fix the issue, it's that good.
Its also important to note that sales support and technical support are two completely different departments at Dell. Even at the corporate level, Dell sales support is not the greatest, unless you get yourself a dedicated account rep who becomes your single point of contact for all things related to sales and shipping. At my previous job, when we went into the "medium to large" business level with Dell, I was assigned a dedicated rep and my sales experience changed dramatically. I could call her any time I needed to with any and all concerns, she was polite and bent over backwards to make sure my business needs were met, would stay in touch with me on a regular basis, even when I had no pending business, got me some great deals on laptops, desktops and servers...and this is with a sales rep who just works on salary, not commission.
Dell often gets a bad rap from a few but very vocal disappointed customers, but on the whole, their quietly satisfied customers far outnumber the upset ones.

this is also my experience.

Good to read a decent experience with a PC co; a friend's experience with HP was dire and my own last experience with a manufactured PC (from UK's Tiny Computers) was the worst customer service I've ever had. It crashed incessantly, the floppy drive never ever worked and not only that, unless you had fingers as thin as a needle it was nigh impossible to take out the floppy (worst case design ever). Tiny didn't fix any of the problems, either with their support guy coming out or sending it back.
From then on, I've built my computers. Laptop-wise I've got Toshiba and never had the need to call in support...my 4 year old laptop that I gave to my mum is still running, and an additional Toshiba I got a year ago is fine.
I'd feel happier if it was easy to fix laptops oneself, such as changing the PSU etc.

Things aren't so happy on my end. The last time I had a Dell desktop, it had a huge multitude of problems, and all the tech support did was keep telling me to reformat. Bloody douchebags. That was the first and last time I ever got a Dell system.

If the douchebag gets bloody, you might want to go see a doctor.
That being said, can you really blame them? Nine times out of ten, "reformat" is the easiest solution. Especially when you are likely dealing with someone who isn't computer-savvy. No offense, but I hope you can understand why they would expect those people to call.
I get just as annoyed when I have to call tech support and explain to the Comcast technician that I know how to hook a TV up, but still get to spend twenty minutes unhooking and rehooking the HDMI cable (which is unreachable without moving furniture, and even then has to be unplugged and replugged blind due to the short length of it...) before they just reset the damned box.

Yet that is no excuse to be rude over the phone, and the problem is not hard drive related (Internet connection/possible browser-related problems, and they're telling me to reformat my system? really?)
I believe the tech support here is no more IT-savvy than the average housewife.