If you are planning to switch from your regular desktop to a laptop machine or buy a laptop for first (even 2nd or 3rd time) time, never ever think about about buying one from DELL.
I bought mine in 2007 and within one year all the trouble started. The bigger problem than the laptop fault was getting service. As many of us know today that DELL does not have any service centers. They promise you to give service just by calling them but never trust them. I struggled for almost 6 months to get my laptop serviced. The customer care number always goes on hold. They will make you wait for hours, but you will never reach through them. Even if call goes to first attendant by luck, there are series of attendants who pass your call to concerned department. In the mean time your call either gets disconnected or will be in wait for hours. Other than these there are several reasons to avoid DELL brand. Such as1. The hopeless service and DELL Laptops are much heavier. 2. Most of the dell laptops don’t have much hardware connectivity options unlike in HP brand. Ex: No Printer Serial port, S-Video etc as found in HP.3. The slot load DVD drive poorly reads any disc and has 95% chance of getting fault within a year. Most of the times the disc gets stuck inside and can’t be ejected.4. My laptop screen got damaged within first 5 months for which I struggled for 6 months to get service and hence my warranty period was lost in this attempt. (See Attached Video)5. Most the drivers that comes with DELL OS are not compatible with general applications. Ex: The sound is disabled when google talk or yahoo messenger is used and every time you need to restart the machine to get it back.6. Quick Shortcut keys like play, pause, stop etc. buttons on the top of keyboard are useless as they are capacitive type which often stops working and you need to remove battery and put it back to make it work. The disadvantage is shortcut keys light up only when touched and hence difficult to see key’s location as both background and key color are same.7. The worst speakers you will ever find which makes burst noise. The volume level is too low and worst quality. You can compare it with ALTEC Lancing which comes in HP brand and you will find a tremendous difference in quality and output. ALTEC Lancing is the Best which is found in HP machines.8. The touch-pad doesn’t come with lock key as found in HP machine.9. The dell support center application that comes with every dell machine for support services has nasty BUG (ERROR) which gives a "Stack over at level 0" error which reduces your machine speed to 12-14% and sometimes machines crashes which is very dangerous. (Check the attached image).