> Because they are brilliant machines, and the customer support is equally brilliant if > you invest in a decent warranty plan.
They do occasionally come up with a lemon, I had one that had a separate video card and the way the two boards connected meant that there was a lot of mechanical stress on it. I put in a second hand motherboard & graphics card from ebay in there and it doesn't get moved much now and is still going, it must be nearly ten years old now.
The dell I had before that used to cook hard drives and the tv out on most of them blew after plugging them in a couple of times. The first indestructible dell laptop I had was an inspiron 8600. The latitude d820 I had after that blew it's graphics card, although the monitor was a bit rubbish.
My next was a xps 1530, which is fine except it had one of the NVidia chips that died.
I would still recommend dells, but if you're spending a lot of money then I would always pay for on site warranty and if it's a laptop then also accidental damage.