I bought an 1800 series Compaq a couple of years back and it has been flawless, it's the backup to my desktop. I bought it with a 6 gig HD and that was too small so I asked if I could have it upgraded to a 12 gig, Compaq told me it couldn't be done on that machine. I said WHAT, and you are the computer people? I bought a Toshiba 20 gig, installed it myself. Runs fine, plenty of room. I love my Compaq, their highly skilled trained tech support team is as dumb as mud and can't spel compack computr though. I have heard wonderful things about Dell, Gateway, and Macs.... but then I've heard horror stories too. I don't think anyone has a perfect system. Once you pop the case it's hard to find the same name as you see on the outside of the case. You find IBM, Toshiba, Texas Instruments, Sea Gate, Western, Sanyo, Cyrix, AMD, Motorola, Rockwell, (just to name a few) everything but the name on the front.... It's what's INSIDE that counts!