I had a horrible experience with Dell.

[Alex K]

My HP pavilion laptop I got from Best Buy in '05 as an emergency substitute turned out to be an absolute dream and a real workhorse. I was surprised myself. Now I'm exclusively Lenovo though.

[Pat Mustard]

Used work on the factory floor for Dell when I was saving to repeat a year at uni, working on the weekend shift. There were awful probems with the management culture within the company. For example during my time there the national minimum wage was risen and management tried to make out that as we were getting a 13% shift allowance they didn't have to raise our wages to the national rate. The weekend shift mostly built laptops, yet the line we were working on was built for desktops, you can imagine the amount of rejects and returns that caused.

[Alex K]

That explains why my touchpad was built in wrong.

[brewer]

The farmer that lives there is an ass hat.

[RozKek]

I'm used to dealing with PC manufacturers for my customers, they are all a fucking nightmare.
Most brands are fairly shoddy in build nowadays, but I'd say HP and Toshiba are the worst for that. Toshiba have just gone downhill with most of their products, including televisions.
HP have some decent specs for price, but the saving is definitely made on the build quality. Pretty much just a fancy cardboard box.

I just googled Toshiba and just today there were several swedish articles talking about how it's going downhill and that their 'chairman' is resigning.

[Aoi Magi]

I am on my Dell laptop right now. It's done great till now, and I can assure you I have abused it quite enough already. As for when it does start having problems, I plan on fixing it myself like I do with my desktop. Sending it in to the company is way too much hassle and money outside the warranty period.

[Pat Mustard]

That explains why my touchpad was built in wrong.

Another thing that would explain it was that every time a builder would hit their hourly target in a full shift their target would be increased by three. You'd be set fifteen towers/laptops per hour, achieve that it becomes eighteen, achieve that it becomes twenty one, achieve that twenty four and so on.

[KevinM1]

Dell's cheap computers (Inspiron laptops, non-XPS desktops) suck. Their moderate-to-expensive computers are fine (my entire family has used a variety of Dells for over a decade with no problems). Can't speak on Alienware.