I have never bought Dell, they make decent PCs and look fair, but not a big fan of trying to get them to help with anything. A friend of mine had their laptop bios password set on accident. This is like the computer equivalent of locking your keys in the car.
Dell support wanted $59 to give a master password to unlock it. Seeing as how its stored in the eeprom and not the CMOS on many laptops, this was not an easy, remove the battery, set a jumper, or short the pins trick. Not much a tech support guy could do with this certain model. Noting how old the laptop was and run down and prices of eeprom chip readers aren't so cheap, it was cheaper in the end to buy a new used laptop and stick the old hardware in as upgrades.