Tech Support Lying on First Call over Dead Video card in a XPS M1730

I have been a Dell customer for many years now and own many of there products in my business and home. (2 servers and 6 desktops in the business, 4 laptops and 1 desktop at home)

Reported in failure of my GPU (8800m GTX SLI) 3D and SLI modes to Tech support, ran through the usual diagnostics for nearly 3 hours to be told that the GPU is faulty and needs to be replaced. Tech support guy apologises that part is on back order but would be repaired in 5-7 days. Before ringing I looked up the issue and found hundreds of cases of people waiting for the same GPU, some for months! So when tech guy said 5-7days I quizzed him and his supervisor multiple times to confirm the repair timescale, both replied it would be completed.

Next day after a night’s sleep I was still bothered about the timescales relayed to me so I decided to call Tech line again and speak to a manager to try to get resolution on the timescale. After a little time waiting finally got put through, the manager told me that the Tech guys from the day before had no authorisation to tell me 5-7 days and confirmed that there is no ETA on the parts, I reminded the manager that it was supposed to be a NBD warranty and the laptop is a critical resource for me and my business, I only purchased this laptop due to the upgraded warranty to ensure a smooth recovery if a failure occurred how wrong I was !! The manager did not seem to care about the NBD or giving customer service, he was not rude but it was evident he did not really care.

I am lucky enough to have had to no failures at my business but my daughters 1525 did have a HDD failure a year ago, that proved very difficult to get resolved as Dell failed to send the HDD on 3 attempts and the Engineer failed to show on 2 occasions, in the end I completed the work myself once the HDD turned up. I put this poor support down to a one off but it looks like this is turning out again and may be the normal sequence of events. I am due to upgrade my business systems next year when we upgrade the software package to the latest release, which will entail servers and desktops due to needing more power to run. This experience at present is starting to make me consider which hardware provider to use in the future, I would rather stay with Dell as it has been problem free for 5 years but the support given is not helping.

I only reported this in to Dell Tech support on Thursday but already they are lying to me about resolution, this is not acceptable from a large company. I am not prepared to wait for weeks / months for Dell tech to falsify and delay resolution. So what I am trying to find out if there is anyway to actually talk to senior staff with proper decision making authority as if the laptop fails completely (Only 3D and SLI offline at present) I am without a key critical system and will lose mobile working, business and money.