Dell? Make decent computers? Right...

The first company I worked for had a couple of Dells and they were the solidest things I've ever used. We ran every wonky beta of Chicago and NT4 on them and they never crashed except when bugs in the OS, or under Chicago bugs in userland, told them to. They were physically solid, too; we could lob them in the back of vans and take them to trade shows and they just worked. They were also Pentium 90s.

Today's Dells are just ordinary-quality PCs; the only reason you'd want to throw them in the river is their departure from standards -- the custom ATX power connector, for instance, or their insistence on cable-select for IDE. (Yes, cable-select is a standard, but it's a pretty non-standard standard.)

Peter