I have had two Dell laptops in the past 18 months and never had any problems with them. My friend spilt a big glass of wine all over the first one and destroyed it, but I sent it back and they replaced the motherboard for free. It was as good as new within about a week. I bought a replacement one meanwhile, and it's grand. No built in mic and no multiregion DVD player, which I had with the previous one, but it's still good. Only now, the casing around the screen is starting to crack off. It's just out of warantee so I don't know what to do about it!

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Have a laptop and a desktop both from Dell, and must admit, I find both of them excellent. Atleast its easier to deal with someone from dell rather than those that claim to know what they are talking about in PC World.

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I have 3 laptops from them. Not really a bother from any of them at all except the new one.
It had bloatware. Google desktop and what not.

2 Yrs ago - Inspiron 9100
1yr 1/2 ago - Inspiron 6000

4 Months ago - XPS M1210. The daddy.

Excellent laptops anyway, the new one is mad fast, but got slow recently due to extra programs on it etc.

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They make excellent business machines, and their high-end PC's can be pretty good too, but I wouldn't touch them for a gaming box myself. I'd (in fact I have) build my own. Upgrading a dell can be a very painful/expensive/impossible job.
Their servers are also a bit crappy when compared to offerings from HP and IBM.

Sparky: if you build a PC for someone, always do it on condition of not providing them with free tech support forever - after all, you're the one doing them a favour
Once its shown to work after you deliver it, its their problem after that!