Three years isn't good enough!
My Dell has been nothing but trouble for the past 3 years. The cost of repairs eventually exceeded the cost of a Mac. I finally relented and bought a Mac and have had no problems.
We have Dells and are battling memory issues. Their cheap motherboards will only take 16G of RAM. That turns Eclipse on a Virtual Machines for Groovy/Grails development into a real problem.
I used it for 12 years, replacing the wheel mouse numerous times and the dial up modem in 2005($13 at Walmart).
The problem was that IE had long since stopped working, but I was able to use a very old version of Firefox, which I had to use because Firefox had long since stopped supporting windows 98. I still have it because it has about 400 napster files on the hard drive.
The new HP I bought had the hard drive go out about a month after the warranty expired. That cost $100-125. plus about $400 worth of aggravation.
I’ve had mine for 5 years. The only problem I had while under warranty was the CD drive didn’t work. I called Dell- they had a guy out the next day, slapped in a new one and it’s been great since.
My other Dell I had for 4 years and my screen finally gave out..It was cheaper to buy new computer (in the long run) then to replace the screen.
We use Dells at work and we have about 30K employee’s. They get replaced every 3 years (capitialized).