A little over a year after teaming up to offer in-store technical support, the folks in Bentonville have dumped Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) as their partner. Walmart (NYSE: WMT) now plans to use its Sam's Club division to help its consumer electronics customers.

Sam's Club will offer free technical support for many consumer electronics products offered in Walmart stores and will even offer home delivery and installation services for a fee. The question I have is this: does Sam's Club have employees with a decent level of technical expertise who can help instead of frustrate customers?

Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) said yesterday that it will sell a 900-person customer support call center in El Salvador to an outsource company that handles support for large global corporations. Stream Global Services, Inc. will take over the customer support center as Dell continues to find ways to slash costs as much as it can.

Stream Global indicated that it will enhance the center to handle upcoming support needs from emerging Latin American markets. My question is this: is Dell once again having an identity crisis about running its own support organization? After all, this is the company that outsourced some U.S.-based support to India a while back, an effort that fell flat on its face. Yes, there is a difference between support centers in India that take care of U.S. customers and Latin American support centers taking care of Latin American customers.

Still, Dell should once and for all just outsource global support for its consumer product lines and call it a day. But wait a minute -- isn't the consumer market the one Dell has used in the last 18 months to claw its way back to growth after discovering consumer retail sales were a sales holy grail? Yes it is. And there are some heavy competitors in the commodity PC business these days, along with a market share-grabbing Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) to deal with. At this time, Dell, did not have any comment on the possible sale of other global call centers. The company probably does not know what it wants to do. It wouldn't be the first time.

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) continues to face swashbuckling from customers and their advocates over its customer support procedures and processes. Now, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has sued the second-largest PC maker over consumer complaints. While Dell's reputation on the customer support front has regained some semblance of competence lately, are there still lingering problems at the computer manufacturer?

The NY lawsuit is specifically related to consumer complaints in that state, so it's not indicative of an overall customer support problem, at least, not in this lawsuit. The AG's litigation stipulates that Dell and its financial services unit engaged in deceptive practices to sell computers. This, in effect, does not sound like a true "customer support" problem at all -- related to hardware or software support -- but to possible wrongdoings that include misleading promises of financing terms and interest rates.

Dell said that it would vigorously defend itself. Of course. A company representative also stated that "our customers are our top priority at Dell ... while even one dissatisfied customer is too many, the allegations in the AG's filing are based upon a small fraction of Dell's consumer transactions in New York." Was Dell really trying to boost profits in its service sector by fattening up warranty income costs and selling unnecessary contracts and parts to customers? It will be interesting to see what proof the New York AG comes forward with here to prove this case.