Quite honestly folks... Dell? Think about their motto: "#1 in customer support" How do you become #1 in customer support? With a lot of practice!
If I was a new car salesman and you were buying a new Lincoln, and I said to you 'Mr. Customer, come look over here at this Dell car, it's $20,000 less and it has all the same bells and whistles as the Lincoln, actually you have to pay extra for most of them, but the car is new and as nice as a Lincoln'... you'd be skeptical.
Most Dells are Yugos, plain and simple. Inferior hard drives and ram and motherboards and cases and keyboards and screens. How do you think Dell can afford to sell them so cheap? Besides the fact that in order to get a machine from them that is any way up to par with standards, you must UPGRADE the RAM and the hard drive. On their site right now is a notebook with a Intel Core Solo processor, 512MB Shared Single Channel DDR2 SDRAM, and a 60gb HD, CD burner and DVD ROM. The STANDARD for that caliber of machine is 1GB of DDR2 RAM, 100GB HD, DVD burner and CD burner. So, we have to upgrade 3 of the 4 most major aspects of the machine.
Now, this is NOT to say that Dell doesn't sell nicer machines, but you pay for the nicer machines! The machines they advertise on TV and in magazines are always sub-par. And you'll be next in line to experience their customer support!
Oh, and now that Dell owns Alienware, it's only a matter of time before those notebooks fall apart, too!
Yeah, there are a lot of Dells out there, but there are a lot of old Hyundai's and for a while there were a lot of Ford Pinto's and Chevy Vega's too.
Much like their TV's Sony makes an outstanding notebook and desktop. By far the BEST selling in the retail environment to a specific clientele. Sony caters to customers who want a machine that is decked out! Their support is outstanding, and their machines are incredible, and their bundles software is great. Every machine in my house is a Sony and my desktop runs 24/7... 4gbs of DDR2, almost 1 terabyte of SATA storage, and a Pentium D processor. The machine runs Pinnacle and renders video in the background while I continue to surf the Internet with multiple pages open at any given time, Photoshop open, and Outlook open. My notebook is a Sony with a Pentium M, 2gbs of RAM, 100 gb of storage, built in AIR card so I have internet EVERYWHERE I go, and all that with a 10" screen!
So, as NJ said... Sony Vaio!
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