I know that at work we have moved totally away from Gateway machines (very poor reliability) and over to Dell. We buy two grades of machines from them. The basic "home" style box that is usually on sale from Dell and then some engineering higher end workstations. In both cases the machines have proven (over the past 4 years) to be very reliable and we have had no issues with warranty work when needed.

The one observation is that the engineering grade machines, even though are the same clock speen and processor, do seem to have an edge in the performance department. This is not a subjective observation, we have run exactly the same simulations on each of the boxes and the more expensive one always wins. I think that it has something to do with the grade of the motherboard chipset and peripherals.

Had I known that originally I might have gotten one of the better ones for home.

In any case, the Dell machines are a good bet in my book.

I will also add that I have an HP Pavillion 763n here at home (2.4GHz P4) and it is an OK box for home. Sometimes it seems to get a little bogged down more than I would like (my P3 900MHz Dell at work does not).

Oh... and I would stay away from Compaq machines as well... they are now HP but the stuff that they have for the consumer line is crap.

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