Mmmm my super hi spec lappy decided to freeze on me a few times yesterday .... never thought any more about it till it wouldn,t boot up again and froze on the boot screen :-? .... so i puts in a call to the helpline and was not suprised to be answered by someone in a forgien land therefore the usual communication problems started
....... after over an hour on the helpline and trying various things and diagnostic boot ups which still wouldnt get passed the boot screen the system is to be collected on Tuesday and taken away for up to 7 days for repair ..... However i was a little suprised at this cause i have the next day " at home " warranty ... he said its so it can be fully tested to see whats wrong but cant an engineer do that at my place :-/... and as for replacing parts surely he can carry enough parts to replace what is actually causing the problem .... its only a laptop after all , parts cant be that big
..... and its not even 6 months old
... oh well back to the old coal burning laptop i suppose , its better than nothing 
Sorry .... rant over , i feel better now

As it seems to be hardware problem.....he only needs 3 things...
Usual process is
1. Change the memory
Fix it? No
2. Change the proccessor
Fix it? No
3. Change the system board
By now it must be fixed 
And as TB says if you have Onsite warranty......you can insist a 'engineer' visits you.....tho you may prefer to send it away, as you could be hanging about at home for hours waiting for the 'engineer' to fix it, depending how technical they are.
And ive seem some real numpties in my time.....i think the best ever one was.....i had to show him how to take the side off a HP desktop and that was a HP 'engineer'

Just of the phone again and it seems as mine is a complicated issue and not something that can be narrowed down to motherboard or anything specific it needs extensive tests at there factory . The diagnostic boot ie pressing and holding d whilst powering on is producing different results every time :-/ . So it needs to go away 
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Uh-oh, bull shit detector on overload, they haven't got a clue what they are doing, and are fobbing you off with a pseudo technical excuse (a load of crap).
Think about it , what is the most expensive part of any laptop ?. The screen ?, the mainboard ?, the case ?. NO YOUR WORK. How many hours have you spent typing stuff into the machine, lots I would imagine. Now multiply that by your hourly rate, and I'll bet it comes to a lot more than your laptop cost. And there is a real risk they will just wipe the hard drive if they can't be bothered to sort a software problem. I know HP will wipe a hard drive if they can't be bothered, and Dell prob aren't any different. If there is anything important on the drive it is worthwhile removing it before sending it off, else you might loose your work.
I have seen a number of these Dell XPS machines duff because of bad soldered joints/crap components doing jobs they are not suited for, and as for HP repairs that last for 4 months then die again. Its not worth buying a new laptop, they tend to fail to early.
Ken