Agreed. I tend to perform a lot of research before my computer purchases, though. A major part of my research involves chipsets, and compliance with standards.
Using those standards, I tend to buy more from generic suppliers and white box builders than I do major brands, with a few exceptions.
My current laptop is an MSI GT680R. I purchased it (in 2010) with 8GB of RAM but have upgraded it to 16GB. It's got hardware RAIDed dual HDDs and a quad-core i7. The HDMI, wireless, DVD, dual-monitors, all networking, NVidia graphics, sound--everything on it--just works.
Same here. I build all my machines from quality off-the-shelf components of my own choosing.
The Dell laptop referenced in the previous message belonged to my sister-in-law, who's cluelessness resulted in contracting a particularly virulent bug, from which I couldn't recover. Had to buy a Dell recovery disk on ebay. By that time, she bought a new laptop, leaving me with the old one. (Which works very well, thank you very much!)