Sorry to hear about your Dell problems. When I bought my Gateway (years ago), I think that I spoke to every single tech support person at Gateway trying to resolve my problems. They shipped me three different monitors, replaced every part inside my computer, and even had me send the computer back to the company (where they could not find a thing wrong). My problem was a "shimmering" display on my monitor. Since I work with computers all day long, I know that it's possible to have a rock solid video image. The very last tech support person that I talked to at Gateway basically told me to suck it up and choose between a flickering monitor (60Hz refresh) or the shimmering.
Years later, I still have the Gateway tower case and power supply, the sound card (which doesn't play nicely in a plug-and-pray mode), and that darn monitor. It turns out that it probably was the monitor all along, but the UPS guy begged me to ask Gateway to stop shipping monitors to my house.
Dell computers are by no means perfect. When my neighbor decided to buy a 2nd Dell computer in as many years, I thought that I would be able to transplant his Zip drive from the older model to the new one. I was wrong. Dell's cases tend to have a lot of twists and turns, and I would have had to find a custom bezel in order to make the Zip drive work. That was my biggest beef with the system.
Our company now purchases only Dell computers and I recently got upgraded to a shiny new Dell laptop that I can use in my docking station at work or on the road.
My other piece of advice. If you can afford a laptop, buy one. Desktop computers are so 20th century. Unless you need raw processing power or terabytes of disk space, a laptop might just fit the bill.