Not supporting the few customers who have problems like that (and which can't be solved by an outsourced script) may be more expensive that what Dell can expect to make from each customer.
That's not my problem with the way they handled it. Orville was on the phone with them for an hour while they tried to troubleshoot Windows. Finally he gave up and called me. I told him to turn off the computer and wait for me and explained I was concerned about heat.
I opened up the case and found little broken pieces of plastic inside, and called Dell back, and spent half an hour trying to order the part.....
The problem I have with the way they handled it is simple: head can damage computer chips, and when you have a system which is bluescreening on boot, you really need to check out heat problems before you start troubleshooting the software. I was surprised that after hour of constantly being powered on and off without an attached heat sink, it still worked after getting the part replaced...... But it did. They could have fried his computer and never knew they did it.
So it may be prudent from their side.