I recommend Alienware or Falcon Northwest.
--Boris
I thought Dell did a good job apologizing for that incident and going the extra mile to try and make ammends for it.
That particular incident was a bureaucratic screwup, which Dell offered to make good. If it was an isolated incident, I wouldn't hold it against Dell, which has been very good to me, as far as support goes.
Or at least, Dell support was very good until they farmed out ALL their phone support to India. I guess it's that "no American wants to do this job" thing.
Aside from the aggravation of a time lag as the call goes up and down the sattelite link, their techs have only a FAIR grasp of English. They are also lacking in any real PC troubleshooting skills. They follow a written script, and demand you follow it, too.
I recently spent three hours determining that a Dell desktop couldn't see the CD drive, and could not install the proper drivers for the hard drive, either. That told me it was bade IDE electronics on the motherboard. We have over 5000 Dells where I work, so I know a thing or two about them.
I spent an agonizing hour on the phone the first time, only to have a new CD drive sent to me that did not fix the problem. The tech in India would not give me one minute to explain my reasoning to him. I suspect it would have gone over his head, anyway.
The next call to India was TWO hours long. After making me connect and disconnect stuff (and insisting I put the phone next to the computer so they could hear me working), they ran out of excuses, and ordered me a new motherboard, which arrived the next day, and fixed the problem.
I don't know how much money Dell thinks they saved by wasting three hours of my time and the tech's time, but it can't be trivial, even for India. When they had American techs, I could at least make small talk with them, which made things go easier. There wasn't enough common culturally between me and the Indian techs to even attempt that. And their technical level was inadequate.
Dealing with Dell's American tech support was never fun, but at least it went smoothly, and reasonably quickly. I didn't have to dread calling.
Now the aggravation level goes sky-high in dealing with their Indian techs. And all because "no American wants to do that job". At least not for $1.25 per hour, which is what techs make in India. I've always liked Dell hardware, at least in their business models. The home systems are a different matter. But I will be very reluctant to spend another dime with Dell after they've cheapened their support.
Since when is Dell anti gun ? I planned to make my next computer a Dell and not a Gateway for the very reason that Gateway is anti gun. I seem to remember in that incident that Dell apologized to the gunsmith and gave him a free computer. It was some low level anti in the Dell offices that refused to sell to him.
I recommend purchasing a good motherboard, processor, CPU fan and heat sink, RAM, hard drive, case with power supply, a graphics card, keyboard and mouse from someplace like NewEgg.com. You can put something together yourself that has lots more bang for the buck. The hardest part is knowing which components to purchase. Assembly is a piece of cake as long as you have purchased suitable components. Choose a motheboard first. Everything follows from there. Choose a motherboard with one of the latest chipsets and five or six PCI slots. Onboard network card and sound is okay, but nothing else.