Thanks for the warning, Dell_user. What about the replace keyboard solution you said in a previous post? Is that universal, I wonder.
I have been looking at these machines for some time, and yesterday contacted Dell, spoke with sales person instead of tech support. The sales rep said she did not know about the specific boot problem, but did say they had some problems late last year with 8500s that had originally had win7 and were upgraded to win8. She also said the newer shipments had win8 as the original OS and as far as she knew, problems solved. Be gret to hear from Dell on this subject.
On another front, I had also been checking the availability of this machine in my area Best Buys and approx. 2 weeks ago saw the availabilty changed from "available" in some stores, "ship to store" at others to "unavailable" at all stores. I went as far as to check other zip codes around the country and all stores I looked at showed "unavailable". The specific model is X8500-1059BK. I thought it would be kinda weird that all those stores sold out at about the same time and wonder if Dell took action on these models.