I've owned four Dell laptops over the years; my current workhorse is an Inspiron 8200. I had such extreme problems with their customer service and support that I'll never buy from them again.
Some Dell customers may say that the service is
all right, but of course that's to be expected; they can't screw up all the time, because that would imply a sort of f**ed-up efficiency. Go to sites like epinions.com, though, and notice all the extremely dissatisfied users! It's like a quarter to a third of the people are rabidly anti-Dell after buying one and experiencing the support.
The T42p is the best machine money can buy right now, hands down-- better than Voodoo or the Sager POS heavy-ass laptops that some people seem to crave. The T42 is basically an updated T41; I don't believe that the T41, for instance, offers Dothan. If you get an IBM, you'll want some flavor of T42. You should be able to get into one for $2000 or less.
One of my Dells in the past (older Inspiron) fell apart at the seams, literally; one side of the case just opened up and the hinge fell apart. My last Inspiron, an 8100 which at the time was a top-of-the-line machine, came with a cracked motherboard; replaced. The screen went out not one, not two, but three times and was replaced every time, and afterwards would still occasionally get wicked hot and cut off (don't ask, they never figured it out, even after the mobo replacement and two new backlights). Toward the tail end of my experience with this laptop, both batteries failed to be recognized/charged by the system; even an OS and driver reinstall didn't help, and I just let the warranty lapse in disgust. It's still bootable, but I only start it up in case I want to check the hard drive for files; I'm probably going to remount the hard drive in an external enclosure and
heave the goddamned thing into the dumpster.
Why did I buy an 8200 afterward? Because I was all excited over the Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB, and it was the only laptop around that had it at the time, and the price was okay. I also figured that my bad experiences with Dell were just a run of bad luck-- wrong. I had a royal PITA experience afterward with which I won't bore you.
Oh, just one more thing: it's not only their service but their entire back-end workflow that sucks. Their reps can never tell you when something will arrive, or where it is in the build process, and their website doesn't have up-to-the-minute data; if it's accurate to within three days you're lucky. I ordered a desktop from them with expedited shipping; their website said it hadn't yet been boxed the day it was delivered, left outside in a snowstorm with a pile of snow on top of the box and a gaping hole in the side. I s**t you not. The crappy delivery was at least partly the fault of the delivery service, sure-- but they didn't know the goddamned thing had even been put in the box.
Oh, just one
more thing
: their US-based support has always sucked, so it can't all be blamed on shipping things out to India. Their second-level tech support sucks too-- they just sit there like dumb monkeys reading things off of troubleshooting scripts, instead of being experts in their field. You usually wind up being on the phone with them for about three to four hours (including multiple wait times) before they make the decision to ship out a new part and have done with it. It's my honest belief that they keep track of the minutes spent-- that they have a required level of customer suffering for every part they ship out.
So, Dell sucks-- but luckily, in IBM, you have the best alternative in the world. (Fujitsu makes great small-and-light laptops too, but their smaller ones all have crappy graphics.)
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