Your laptop seems to have had some problems, too, you know. :P

And Torie's IBM Thinkpad had multiple harddrive failures, and I would expect better from them.

I'm not in love with Dell myself, but they've been pretty good so far, and I use them at work with few problems. If I were going to generalize I would say Compaq and Gateway were reliably crappy, though.

I just feel the need to defend Dell, because otherwise that means my laptop is doomed! And I don't want it to be doomed, particularly this summer.