One thing I will tell you that made my mind up to buy Dell is that they "burn in" (or power up & operate) their systems for 72 hours straight before they ship it to you. If something is going to go wrong, it will generally happen during the first 2 or 3 days of operation due to a faulty component, software glitch, etc... At the time I bought it (3 yrs ago), Dell had the best record in the industry as far as customer returns for defects go.