Honestly, I've about had it with PC manufacturers and frankly, would love to start a company that creates machines for people who are actually capable of using them and maintaining them and only require support for difficult problems. After my recent purchase from Velocity Micro, I swore I'd never go to a manufacturer again - at least that time it was out of necessity. This time, somewhat out of necessity too - I landed a pretty sweet XPS M1730 machine. All and all, great machine, and certainly more performant than the piece of junk Alienware I had a while back (which is an interesting situation in and of itself).
At any rate, I ordered it with Vista Home Premium given that this (believe it or not) will be replacing my company issued laptop as my mobile device (I'm sure not carrying threecomputers around) and I'll be installing Vista Ultimate from MSDN on it. As with most machines, the first thing I do is wipe it and start a fresh install - I'm pretty high maintenance that way - and once the install completes, it starts loading Vista and blue screens - repeatedly.
I called their support center to see if there's anything they could help with, since I had identified the offending driver (it wouldn't even boot into safe mode btw) and according to them, unless you do the Windows Upgrade Anytime or purchased it with a particular version of the OS, they wouldn't support it.
At that point I was pretty infuriated (me, at a computer manufacturer for having stupid policies or tech support people?! no way!) and asked to be transferred to someone who could initiate a return on the computer - after all, if my computer won't boot in a perfectly fine OS, it's a 3k piece of junk. After receiving my RMA, I fiddled with the package contents and found an absurd piece of software that allows you to boot into the machine to play DVDs without loading the OS. I noticed some oddities in the partitioning before and reading the package contents on that particular piece of software, it seemed to fit together. Again, I wiped my formally pristine machine and was forced to create useless partitions for no apparently good reason and continued to install Vista...after which, it booted without blue screens.
So...long story short, if you expect support on Vista Ultimate and are an MSDN user - you need to buy Vista Ultimate. And if you don't...make sure to use the ridiculous media player partitioning software first before installing Vista fresh.