I had a Gateway for 4 years or so, never a problem with it.
Got a Dell and had 2 hard drives go bad. The 2 they sent out were wrong. I have 2 250 GBs of Raid 0, they sent out 2 80 GBs. They told me over the phone that it's a way to change 80 GBs to 250GBs, yea, right. Then a tech told me that a RadeO is the same as a Raid 1, yea, right again. But when it was all over with, it came out to 5 new hard drives, then I had to change 2 of them to make them into a Raid O all within 6 months
I could go on about how bad the techs are, but it would take to long. One of them that came out to the house, well lets just say he didn't like Dell and said they are a greedy company.
My best friends wife works for Goddard (runs computers & goes all over the country) and she also does stuff for the Navy and Nasa. My friend told me she doesn't like Dells that she wished she knew I was going to be getting a new one, so she could have got me something better.
My brothers son, has a Dell, 5 months after having it, it went up. 4 times, the techs that came to his house ordered the wrong parts or didn't know what was wrong with it. The techs on the phone sent the wrong stuff also. He works down the ocean, so it has been sitting for 3 months, but before he left, it was down close to 2 months
With that said I have the Dell 8400
Pentium 4 Processor with HT 3.60 GHz 800 FSB
the memory is 2 GB duel channel ddr2 at 533MHz (2x1GB)
Hard Drive- 500GB proformance raid O (2x250GB sata HDDs)
Dual Drives48x CD-rw Drive + 16x DVD+/- with dbl layer write campability
It has 7 or 8 USB ports (don't feel like crawing under the table to look)
Its a Media Center 2005 and Pro XP with a Dual TV Tuner & remote.
There is more , but to lazy to type
Over all, it's a very good computer. It's fast, very quiet. I can record TV (DirecTV) play a DVD and download or get caps at the same time and have other things going on, and with the Hyper Threading, it does not slow down or lock up.
If it were not for the techs and the hard drives, I would say get a Dell. But for me, my next one will be a Gateway again