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I've never had a warranty honored straight away with no difficulties, but those approaches have got me through so far. They always find an excuse to refuse at first, probably assuming I don't know my rights and will just give up. </snip> My daughter had a warranty issue and was told by a sales person we knew that the stores who sell the laptops make very little on the transaction and if there is a warranty claim they have to foot the bill and may or may not get reimbursed by the supplier who may or may not and probably won't get reimbursed by the manufacturer.
The screen had several faulty pixels which showed up after she installed ubuntu 12.04. The shop took it back, reinstalled windows and put it on the shelf again. Some unsuspecting windows user will not know or care about such trivia. Her replacement works very well. It seems that all along the way each party has to prove that fault lies with the manufacturer, which is virtually impossible to do because it worked when windows was the OS. Most times the store or supplier may just turn a loss on that item if they have sold sufficient numbers of them. So, as we were informed, manufacturers really do not care and have no reason to, they do not easily or often honor warranties, and remain very remote from point of sale. It's best in some ways to buy from the manufacturer if possible to reduce the number of hands along the way. With that in mind, Dell straight out flatly refuse to honor warranties if windows is removed and they will not install anything else.