I honestly don't understand all the grief Dell gets. I've had two Dell laptops, a PDA and a desktop over the last 5 years, and my company has standardized on them (with a brief excursion into Thinkpads, but we came back). New equipment virtually always arrives well before the "scheduled" date, both for my company and my wife's.

While I've certainly had to have my laptops serviced (I do, after all, travel with them and often use them in sub-optimal conditions), I've never had a service issue that wasn't resolved within 48 hours. I've had 2 hard drives, a keyboard, a video card, a heatsink/fan assembly and a palm rest/bezel replaced. I was always given the option of doing it myself or having a tech sent on-site.

For both hard drives, I received significantly larger replacements; a 30GB for the first laptop's 20GB, and an 80GB for the 2nd laptop's 60GB.

I'm sure that the vast majority of Dell's customers get similar service. It's unfortunate that a couple of bad experiences can attract so much attention . . .