In my case, I shopped for a company that offered great service, found one, paid for it, but they won't live up to their promises.

That's a big difference.

Here are some of the things Alienware says (go to the Warranty Bundle section and click on the "Click here to learn more!" link):

"Demand no less than the ultimate in protection. With this plan, not only will you receive a specially discounted price, but you'll also enjoy ...

• Peace of mind, knowing that you have an entire company at your disposal, equipped and ready to ensure that your computer is performing at the superior level you deserve.
• No fees for parts, labor or shipping for any warranty repair, no matter what the cost.
• Onsite Service. If at all possible, you won't have to come to us for your service needs - we'll come to you."

In your case, the vendors have declined your proposal. They are not accepting a deal and then failing to do their part. What they're doing is honest business.

By the way, my wife Becky was a school tech for several years before recently going back to university for her Ph.D. She managed a network of 300 computers--the District had many more. They got onsite support contracts and their (several) vendors honored them. Similarly, our vendors at Florida Tech provide and honor onsite service contracts. The problem might be in the specific wording of your proposal.

The moment someone installs software or hardware on their Dell without Dell's o.k., the computer would no longer be under the lemon law. It is impossible to test systems under all possible hardware and software configurations. You can't expect hardware companies to be reposnsible for changes made to the systems at someone's home or business.

I don't agree. When you buy a computer with Windows pre-installed (and have you noticed how difficult it is to buy a PC WITHOUT Windows? MS is a "convicted" monopolist, yet it's still nearly impossible to buy a PC without the MS tax.) you are informed that support for the system is to be provided by the system's vendor, not MS. The vendor made the choice to sell the system with Windows installed; they should be held responsible if the system doesn't perform as advertised, no matter what component is defective. By excluding the OS from the Lemon Law proposal, you remove a powerful incentive on the part of vendors to insist MS fix the problems in its OS in a timely manner. As they are MS's largest customers, MS is more likely to be responsive to them than they are to the end-users.

I've seen companies in tight situations, trying to deal with unhappy customers when the best solution isn't financially possible. Acting as ethically as possible in these circumstances can be very difficult.

I'm not convinced this is Alienware's situation. There are complaints on the web not so different from mine dating back several years.

The other puzzle has to do with the time Alienware was willing to spend with me on the phone (hours and hours) compared to their complete unwillingness to provide onsite support. I wonder whether their approach, in my case, wasn't more costly for them than an onsite visit.

I could be mistaken, but I feel as though I'm dealing with a nonresponsive policy and an irresponsible attitude, rather than with an immediate-term crisis.

I've never created a consumer-protest website before. I've pushed back on companies before, but not very often on my own behalf. I usually have better things to do with my time. It took a lot to make me decide to push back on Alienware and, at several points, Alienware could have defused this.

Recently, Alienware gave me a full refund. And the Alienware-focused extensions to my consumer protection site, http://www.badsoftware.com/alienwaresucks may help many more of their customers negotiate with them or organize a class action lawsuit against them. These might become much more expensive than any level of warranty savings they could achieve.

I read Kaner's entire post on his site. Alienware suggested that since they did not know exactly what was failing, their on-site technician wasn't skilled enough to repair on-site. However, they were happy to ship Kaner hardware and have him and his wife install it over the phone. In other words, they assumed Kaner was smarter and more capable than their on-site technician.

The Matrox video coprocessor cards add a lot of performance -- when they're installed and configured correctly. My video production jobs were taking 10 hours of computer time -- performance improvements are a big deal with jobs this intense.

But even though there are many very satisfied Matrox customers, there are also people having a lot of trouble. It seemed very important to deal with someone who had a lot of experience setting up and supporting systems with this hardware.

I didn't find that locally (Melbourne is not a large city) and Alienware had both a reputation for experience in the field and heavily-featured systems that were configured with Matrox cards as standard equipment.

As it turned out, many of the problems I had look a lot like this-is-a-bad-configuration-for-Matrox problems -- exactly what I thought I was avoiding by buying from Alienware INSTEAD of buying locally.