Dell Or Gateway

I've had a Gateway PC and a Gateway laptop. Both were crap.

I've had three Dell PC's and I've had no problems.

I say...go with Dell.

I find this to be an surprising statement.
In my opinon Dell support sucks. But it depends what type of support you mean.
Online support is pretty good, you can go to Dell.com ,put in the service tag and get a list of drivers for your machine. Thats the good part. The bad part is that when you do the above, your list might contain 20 different network drivers,with one being the correct one.The same goes for video drivers and models and most other parts.

And if your talking phone support, they have absolutely the worst in the business.So bad that I believe a fellow Warrior put out an ebook of how to deal with Dell Support.
One of the main things he said was tell them you were hard of hearing so you could get someone that actually spoke english as their native language.

I once called to get a price on a part for a customer of mine. The sales rep refused to give me a price unless I gave them all of mine and my customers personal information.
I refused.
Needsless to say, Dell lost the business they could have had.

Another time Dell sent me the wrong part 3 seperate times , and when I finally got fed up and told my customer what had happened and suggested they call Dell direct, Dell told them that I had ordered the wrong part 3 seperate times. Luckily I was able to explain to the customer how Dell looks up the part via the service tag so it was impossible for me to have done it and that Dell was trying to squirm out of their mistake.

I could go on and on with horror stories , but the real facts are that once PCs came under the 1K cost to consumers, almost all the manufacturers started using sub standard parts and we the consumers paid for it in the long run.

Hardly, one or two chips might be the same, but everything else on the motherboard can be a mix of anything. RAM varies drastically in quality let alone all the supporting ICs. Even the quality of the circuit prints and welds on cards and the mobo can vary. I've sent cards back because the edge connectors were crap. Don't forget crappy ports that break when you plug something in. There is no standard for quality in computer components, cheap brands use cheap components.

Oh, about buying a mobo yourself, be very careful and do your research because most of them are crap as well. I'm currently using two computers I built myself and have built many others, Mobos and cards definitely are not created equal.

True. But Dell uses nvidia and ati, intel and amd, creative labs and generic chips, crucial and house memory. just as im sure gateway does. And all those parts will be the exact same as the parts you would go buy at best buy, or at gateway.com from the same manufacturers.

The only difference is going to be the service when it breaks. Does anyone else have next day onsite service or sort of an 'insurance' on their hardware because Dell does.

So what kind of hoops does dell make you jump through?