Did you pay for your Dell support on your credit card? If so, you may be
able to contact your credit card company and withhold payment for services
not rendered. Not sure, with American Express it is usually pretty easy to
work through it and get a refund.

Excellent, you got refunded your $35! I should have done
it that way. I opted for the "free" support, but was on
hold for so long, 1 1/2 plus, that it turned out to be
far from free. Next time I'll have to remember to go the
$35 way on the toll free number.

- quote -

Did anybody but me end up having to pay anyone for tech
support becuase of the recent problem? If so, did you
have any luck getting refunds?

When I started having the problem, I first spent a couple
hours exhaustively searching the MS Knowledge Base, then
I called Dell (because Money was OEM on my laptop, and
the MS customer support page led me to believe that's
what I needed to do). Of course, Dell only offers free
support for the first 21 days, so, feeling incredibly
desperate to get to my file, thinking that something had
become corrupted, and thinking I'm going through the only
channel I'm aware of as an option, I subscribe to a $99
Dell service contract for 6 months.

So Dell naturally couldn't tell me what my problem was
(spent about an hour on the phone with the annoyingly
talkative tech support guy, listening to him do the same
KB searches I had already done), I ended up calling
Microsoft and charging $35 for their one-time help.
That's when I found out the nature of the problem, and I
believe my $35 was refunded.

Dell, however, refuses to refund my money.
They "allowed" me to downgrade my contract to $49 for 90
days (I wasn't even given that as an option when I
purchased the original contract), but wouldn't outright
cancel it and refund the full amount because I did
receive "best effort" support. UGHHHH!

So 2 positive things came out of this ordeal:
(1) I discovered this forum, and
(2) I've developed a better back-up system for all my
data files.

But I don't necessarily think those 2 things are worth
$50 in Dell's pocket .....