I was unwise enough to purchase a Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 (see previous postings: Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 review (Bluetooth, touchscreen, and WiFi failures) and How can a computer company lose data that it gathered only a minute earlier?). After more than 20 hours of technical support efforts via phone and remote login they came up with the idea of me shipping the $2,400 doorstop back to them. This process is supposed to take 2 business days where they decide whether or not to provide “express” or “standard” service (2+ weeks). So if you call them on a Friday and they decide on express/regular on the following Tuesday, the computer doesn’t leave your house until Wednesday. [In the case of this particular XPS 13, however, I called Dell on a Sunday and they didn’t make up their mind on the express/standard issue until Thursday (and even then they didn’t supply return labels), so a minimum of one week was spent in limbo.]
Let’s suppose that this computer eventually does land on a technician’s desk. Given that the hard drive is encrypted with my Windows password/fingerprint, how can it be debugged? The touchscreen, trackpad, Bluetooth, WiFi, and stuck-in-tablet-mode failures tended to be intermittent and were often fixed (temporarily) by a reboot, suggesting that they were software-/driver-related. What can a technician do without the consumer’s password? Test each component individually and say “no fault found” and box the computer back up? Aren’t they actually in a better position to debug a problem if they can remotely log in and poke around with Windows running?
Maybe they’ll just copy the data to a new unit and ship that back to you.
Or they could boot off of their own drive (presumably running the same software it was installed with?) and try to reproduce the problems.
If the problems were intermittent, I suspect this is a futile exercise.
It’s what @Peterson said, they will swap the hard drive to one of their own and test it. However, this will depend on who’s technical support lap your laptop lands on. There are some tech support will not know of this and simply return the laptop saying remove the password.
Next time you ship your computer for support, remove your hard drive and hold on to it — this is what I have always done. Why? There is a small chance your laptop may get “vanished” and they will not be able to locate it (happened to my co-works at a BIG company). If so, at least you still have your data (even if you back things up, having the source data is always reassuring).
Pay for premium next day support and you get American high level phone support and next business day on site support. It is not real expensive, maybe .2 helicopter hobbs time.
Knowing this, maybe you should have given them your password?
Did you try restoring the computer to the factory image? If it was software related, then it was probably something that was installed by you. So restore to factory, see if it is good and then add back your software one package at a time until the problem comes back. If there’s a problem with the factory image then it’s Dell’s fault but they can’t factory test every possible software package (including future Windows updates) for compatibility (and neither can Microsoft test every possible hardware configuration).