See a lot of problems with Dells,HP,and some of the home builds but haven't seen to much on Gateways here. My better half has a gateway and it has helded up fairly well for the two years that she has had it. Have only had to do one reformat on it and that was like 3 or 4 months after we got it, seens like I had to do that to the HP right after we got it too. Are the Gateways' better built than the Dells and HPs, or is it that they are just replaced when they go south?

The best desktop is a custom

As for the proprietors.. eMachines is absolutely the worst.. Gateway is actually probably one of the best.. Then dell.. then hp.

However, I'd say HP makes the best laptops.

my dad has an old fujitsu siemens circa 2000-2002 (its a pentium 3)

Most reliable pc ever Has been our filesever up until now running 24/7 alongside my Proliant

Lovely case, bog standard ATX
Good PSU
Good mobo (apart from the winmodem and limit of 512 per slot, max 1gb)

Josh, my son would not agree that HP makes the best laptop. He just got one in Jan. and has had nothing but trouble with it. He had to send it back once and then when he got it back, they had lost the remote to it and then said he didn't send it with the computer and that's what he through was the problem.It came with VISA and he was telling me that Visa reserves 512mb of memerory for itself, so if you have 2gbs in fact you only have 1.5gbs. Told me this morning that as long as he keeps it over the ac vent it does ok, but take it away from the vent and it runs really hot, so hot in fact that it shuts down on him. He belives that is the vedio card in but HP hasn't been any help.
Is E-Machines Gateway or are they Dells?I know they are an off brand of one one of those makers.
Micron was one of the best up untill they stop producing computers and went to business software. We've had two and deary love them both. They were a bit expensive at the time but each were basicly a custum build.

the 512 memory reserved is for the graphics card. thats the way it is in like 90% of laptops.

Unless you want tech support...

I've heard more to the contrary, but I've not had one myself to make a good comment on it.

If you need tech support then you shouldn't be building your own computer :p Besides, there's always Daniweb to help out

i find that customs are easier to repair

i mean , usually the tech support is poor and i know from experience that due to its proprietary design, dell pcs are cheaper to replace than repair.