I purchased at least a half dozen Dell systems in 2001, mostly Optiplex desktops and a couple of Latitude laptops. The Optiplex systems worked great, and at least three of them are still in use, including the one I gave to my mother in law. The Latitudes were used by an advance team for a political campaign and they were badly abused, but Dell's support staff was great. Even when a damaged laptop looked like someone had dropkicked it, Dell fixed the computer quickly and under warranty.

One of those two laptops is still functional, even though the campaign's policy director set part of the case on fire after trying to get work done by candlelight... (I didn't have that one fixed. I figured that no matter how nice Dell's people were, nobody was going to accept that for warranty work...)

The problem is that nobody reports examples of good service, they only rant about the problems that they heard happened to a friend of a friend's sister's neighbor or something...