wrote in message
when the hard drive failed the computer was up and running in less than
24
hours and we had a more direct phone number to call to get warranty
assistance with out having to wait on hold for more than 3 or 4 minutes.

For $500 you could have bought several laptop hard drives, and they
are generally even easier to install than in a desktop or tower

Not necessarily. He didn't say that it was a removable hard drive. It may
well have been an internal one. I'm not familiar with Dell as a user, but I
also suspect that their drives may be equipped with a semi-proprietary OS
that recognizes only their own hardware fully. In a case like that, some off
the shelf drive would be mostly useless. It's also possible that some OEM
drive could also void all warranty of any type.

system. Did the extended warranty include data recovery, or just parts
& labor?

I've never heard of any retail warranty that includes data recovery and most
certainly, no $500 warranty of *any type* is going to include data recovery
costs other than an OS recovery CD. If you consider that every user
experiences a hard drive crash at one time or another, Dell would have been
out of business a long time ago if they included Data recovery for the
relatively paltry sum of $500. Data recovery costs thousands of dollars in
time and labour.