Some years back I posted here that Dell's Asia-Pacific support center is actually a free online dating club run out of the Philippines. Every time I called I got to speak to a very pleasant young woman who didn't seem to be able to find any record of my previous eighteen calls, but would very much like to listen to my concerns so she can sympathise, apologise, sooth and then throw the details away as soon as I hang up. ;-)

Even so my current notebook is a Dell which has performed without a hitch. I've also had a nice Sony that had dodgy soldering on its network port causing intermittent e-mail and network faults for months.

IMHO notebooks are already "there" when it comes to commodity. They're made in similar/same factories using generic components shared by all the brands. Hopefully this means that variability is reduced and individual machine glitches should be rarer. So you might as well enjoy the cost benefits and buy Dell!