New Dell laptop - unusable product. No support from Dell on their product

My wife bought a brand new Dell Vostro 3500. We loaded Microsoft Office 10 and were excited to get started.

After setting up the laptop we noted the speed of the laptop, it was VERY slow. We restarted and found the laptop to be unusable in its current state, unusable straight from the factory. Upon returning this to the retailer, they noted 3 additional laptops with the same issue on the same day.

We contacted Dell and they advised us to purchase additional RAM. The retailer fixed the other 3 Dell laptops by adding a solid state hard drive.

The service and product quality is not of great standard, not what we expected from Dell!! To top it off they just brushed off our inquiry and said we should purchase more RAM (for a brand new pc with nothing on it - surely this makes no sense. Why manufacture something which does not work straight from the factory?!?)