[Icemaster]

OK, let me clarify:

The company is crap, the equipment is mostly excellant. I've got a work Dell laptop, a personal Dell laptop, and am on my third personal Dell desktop at home. They're easier to buy with the features you want than building one yourself. I've done both.

The company now is another story. I've worked with two fortune 100 companies that had Dell equipment spread about 85% across their respective enterprise. Yes, other companies from Porsche to HP to Stanley Tools have manufacturing issues, no ones perfect. Never once did they come forth and willingly admit that they might have a manufacturing/assembly error even after they were shown empirical evidence that the end users payed us to capture and deliver that they had a specific failure with a specific product line. When you're replacing over 200 LCD inverter boards in 1 month in a specific laptop - to the point that you've exhausted the company's warranty parts supplies - some warning bell somewhere should be going off.

EG 2 - When NVidia announce that their chipset that was installed in a certain Dell model amongst others might have a problem, a month went by and not a word from Dell. Customer had to ask the Dell RVP what was going on about it, who then feigned ignorance. It was only after a threat to pull a recent order that Dell came back and said that they wouldn't do a "recall", however they would perform a voluntary proactive replacement after better than 150 failures in 2 months.

Over the course of 6 years, this averaged pretty much once per quarter.

Most of the suppliers these days a assemblers, it's the support after the sale that matters.