Originally Posted by Flying Banana

Personally I bought a Dell as had had good experiences with them at work. Ended up getting a Dell Inspiron 510m as it won PC Pro Magazine 'Best Wireless Laptop last year when I was looking (and I know things change so it's probably a dinosaur now! It's light, thin, has excellent battery life, supports all the current wireless standards, has a built in modem, network port and IR (bluetooth an option) so can be connected nearly anywhere. Has a 60GB hard drive and a CD RW/DVD player combo drive. The only downside is it doesn't have all singing all dancing graphics, it's fine for internet, office stuff, looking at photos, editing graphics, watchng DVD's etc just don't excpect it to run the latest 3D games. Not an issue for me as I have a decent desktop which does all that.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/labs/55052/de...iron-510m.html (if the site asks for a username to login use billgates)

If you look under the 'Product Reviews' then 'Labs' there are a lot of tests on all sorts of hardware going back over the last year and they do test very thoroughly in 'real world' conditions.

One of their articles is on wireless networking for anyone unsure about that.

Dell Customer Service and support is very variable, when I bought my desktop from them it was fine, the agent I spoke to knew her stuff and sorted everything out. When I bought my laptop I think the cleaner answered the phone and wasn't actually sure what a laptop was.

As far as support goes much the same, had three calls to them in the last 18 months, twice I wouldn't have trusted the person on the other end to sit the right way on a lavatory seat, third time got someone who was very very good and sorted me out in about three minutes flat.

One nice thing with all new Dells is they do give you the proper software disks (eg XP, Office etc) not some butchered system restore pack which installs a load of crap you don't want or use. Also since last July they add a 'mirror' of your shiny new machine's hard drive on it. If you need to wipe it and reinstall everything just back up your personal docs etc, hit F12 when you reboot, confirm you want to restore the drive, go and make a coffee and by the time you get back there is a fresh install of everything just like the day it came out of the box.

If you do have problems with their support/cust services do a google for Michael Dell's email, and send him a complaint directly. I did that last time and three hours later had a senior customer service manager on the line who dealt with my complaint quickly and efficiently.

Originally Posted by marco121068

Just got myself an Inspiron 9200 - and I think it's fantastic (though pricey). I think half their sales / tech support team are located in India - spent 10 minutes going through the quote with this guy who had a very strong Indian accent - and he told me his name was Adrian!

I didn't get the software disks for the operating system - just preloaded.