[Scott Douglas]

10 years ago (has it been THAT long ago already?) when my kids were getting ready to go off to college, I got them both two identically equipped Dell desktops from their refurbished site. Those computers worked fine and I think I'm still using one out in the garage. A year after going to school my son decided he really needed a laptop for travel with the baseball team. He found a Dell Inspiron on the refurb site that had up sized HD and RAM compared to 'stock' and at a good discount too. We bought that for him.
Fast forward 2-3yrs, it quits working on him. He calls to say he's buying himself a new one so I tell him don't throw it away I'll take it.
I store it for a year and then get a letter saying there's been a class action lawsuit against Dell regarding our laptop. They offer to send a return mail box and they'll fix it for free. Within two weeks of turning it in it comes back. It's been working ever since then.
Yes, I've had desktop trouble and had to sit thru two hours of talking to India before getting to talk to someone in Texas. Texas was able to solve the problem within a matter of a half hour of giving me instructions over the phone on how to remove a certain jumper and reboot it.
When I finally upgraded my desktop I went with an HP from Best Buy. Bought it without doing any homework on it, based solely on price/performance as seen in the store. Turns out it happened to be their best selling gaming machine. Guess I got lucky as it's been working for quite a while now with no problems.
There, I've jinxed myself I'm sure now.