I always build my own! Havent had any bad experience with the dell computers I have tried though!

How in the hell is that possible? They pre-load so much shit on the computer and are made with shitty parts. 80% of the time your power supply will die within 1.5 years and you have to order a certain one for it. They use shitty parts and most people don't know where to order parts for them.

Dell makes great computers and servers. Everyone bitches about quality but the reality is Dell has multiple lines of equipment in all areas - consumer, workstation, office, server. You simply can't beat the value, overall. I have hundreds of servers from Dell and they have absolutely exceeded my expectations in terms of a low total cost of ownership and support.

Having owned desktops by almost all manufacturers and even built my own..... in general today's desktop is just a pretty dissapointing experience. Even with my new Sony Vaio laptop I spent 3 hours uninstalling garbage and updating the thing once I bought it.

Components such as hard drives, power supplies, fans all fail a statistically low numbers. Everyone wants to pay as little as possible, generally, and where corners get cut is in areas like power supplies, etc. We all can't argue with them being one of the companies selling the most servers, pcs and laptops on the market. They're not the largest because they have the lowest quality......... it's for a multitude of reasons.

Sure, it's true that they don't manufacture and that they assemble.. But what you're neglecting to admonish is that they test the shit out of everything they sell before it goes to market. Your average OEM or PC builder doesn't do near the research, testing and offer the selection of drivers.

We can all find reasons to pick on Dell but at the end of the day their quality is no worse than any other company. Everyone has lousy support these days with the cheapest computers being serviced by call centers in India. If you demand the highest quality from someone like Dell then don't buy an Inspiron notebook, buy a latitude. Don't buy a Dimension for your office, buy an Optiplex or a Precision.

Something has to give for companies to sell complete systems for $299-$599 on the low end, it's only fair.

Brad

You're in the UK... check out novatech.com

It's where we get all our pc stuff from... real good staff... real good price too!

i can tell you that they have the best support you can ever had.. my laptop had a problem with the monitor, i was already about to buy a new one (really didnt want to right now) and i thought lets give a go at support... explained the problem and the girl (strangely a female tech who KNEW her shit) understood the problem and said that it could be the internal LCD cable that got unplugged for some reason. so she took a notebook identical to mine (we were on the phone) and helped me opening it so we checked its internal components.. after a while, i found out that the LCD's cable was unplugged as she suspected, reconnected it and i have a laptop again!

now this is what i call top notch support.