i think dell desktop systems should be okay. but their notebooks suck. i've dealt with two dell lattitude notebooks (the "business" models, which should presumably be better) in the last year, and they both sucked pretty bad. one of them couldn't figure out it had built in ethernet. you could install drivers fine, and you could get a network connection. but once you rebooted, all of that would be lost. also, sometimes it wouldn't turn on. the other notebook just had some strange performance problems. even on a completely fresh install of windows 2000, it ran at a crawl. the processor was 1.1 or 1.2 GHz, 512 MB RAM, but it felt half as fast...

compaq makes crappy notebooks as well. i've seen one where the motherboard just randomly fried itself. it was only about six months old, and was being used for coding.

my cousin's sony vaio notebook freezes all the time. he's tried low level formats, new hard drives, new memory, everything short of a new motherboard and CPU.