Ok of all the brand name computer companies out there which one do you think is the best. I know myself that building your own custom system is the most economic and likely the best way to buy a computer, but if you were offered the choice of all the top brand names which one would you choose and what makes it better than all the others.

I have owned Dell, Compaq, IBM and an EMachine. In my opinion the Dell was the best. The Dell was inexpensive to buy and was a quite stable system. The Dell also had very little upgadability though, but man did it look sweet! The Compaq was nice looking, ran decent, but was 100% impossible to upgrade.(Other than HDD & Ram. No PCI, ISA, or AGP slots.) The Compaq was also quite expensive. The IBM well it was ok I guess but sluggish and dull looking. The Emachine was the best price at only $399 including 17" monitor but performance was more like non-performance. Hardware conflicts plagued that system and every time I installed windows I had to go in and manually set almost all the device resources. Needless to say that system hit the classified ads for sale in a hurry!

So what do you think?

Yeah ive owned Dells, Gateway, and Compaq. Like you said the compaq performed ok but was totally unable to upgrade whcih is why i didnt ever buy them again. Secondly, my gateway ran great. It had an amazing ability to upgrade and never gave me any performance issues. It was a good system but i must include it was an old server which I upgraded to a desktop. Finally, my latest computers have been dell b/c they are affordable, upgradable, and never have given me issues. No hardware conflicts, drivers are easily accessible and there support system is great if you run into any problems. Overall, I rank the one ive owned in this order: Dell, Gateway and last Compaq.

i think Apple G5 is the best..

I think dell is the best brand that I have used. I own a custom computer now that is the best of all of the other computers I have owned.

First of all, I HAVE to say that ALL name brands suck (for home PC's) for one reason or another. Compaq's are/were the WORST company to ever make PC's, between the crap hardware they jerry-rigged together and the non-existant support. Ironically HP is probably the only name brand I could support, dispite the fact that they absorbed Compaq and took to using some of thier "support" methods. Dell's Tech support is the best by far, but the quality of their hardware leaves much to be desired. IBM is a joke for PC's, I don't know why they even bother anymore. Dell Laptops are ultra-cool, and I would recommend going name brand for laptops, so I would probably recommend either Dell or HP for laptops. Emachines I know next to nothing about, I have not worked on one YET, however given the low price and availablilty, I expect to see some used ones float through the school system here next year or the year after.

I have delt with thousands of Compaq's because in my last couple of jobs my employers have loved compaq's for some rediculous reason, I think they are all junk. The hardware inside any given model is random and appears to be the cheapest available. Ie. I once recieved 20 Compaq Deskpro EN SFF's with the exact same model number at a school I work for, of those 20 machines I have 5 different video cards, and 3 different network cards, of those 20 machines 5 were non functioning right out of the box, and 15 monitors died within one week of reciept. This type of senario is far from unique with compaqs in my experience.

i agree on the name brand issue. really, all name brands suck and it's so much better to custom-build your own computer with OEM parts.
I agree that compaq desktops suck. irritating as hell when trying to repair them. i have a compaq laptop tho, and have had 2 before this. several others i know also have them, and i don't think they're so bad. sure i would like something maybe from alienware or something like that, but in lieu of not have the money, a compaq is a good deal. never had any major problems with any of them.... though i don't like either the haphazard use of various pieces in them. one's got a toshiba cd-drive, another has QSI, another is some other wierd brand, etc.

That is the biggest problem with Compaq, they go with the cheapest hardware at the time, and they are continually changing the hardware. There seems to be no logic to it at all. You would think a company with the buying power of Compaq would be able to go to Toshiba and say "We will buy toshiba CD-drives for every of our laptop model Xxxxxx off you if guarantee to have the price of $xx.xx per drive." Toshiba's response would probably be to sign the contract and start shipping before the Compaq execs got back to the office. There is no reason that Compaq needs to randomly change Hardware suppliers every five minutes, they ought to be able to keep the same h/w per model, but they just don't even try.

I'd have to say that [new] Dell's are overall best. They are quite stable and also easy to maintain (going inside, it's almost as if the drives were made to be swappable). I've only gotten one problem with them, and I think it had to do with hardware conflicts. Largely, I think they have a good support, but the best support is yourself because you know how everything is configured. At least you should. Custom-built machines are good, but you get the downside of possibly having to deal with twenty different vendors if you get hardware problems and want to claim warranty. Compaqs are "meh"; I don't have that much experience with them. IBMs aren't that bad, but the laptop from them that I use (ThinkPad T20) shipped with a bad re-image CD, and had some stability problems before we upgrade to WinXP. Their support is cooperative, though (we got a good image CD after calling), although not shipping a modem driver with it while expecting you to download it isn't that smart....

Hi there!
I am from Brazil, and here, all brand sucks. They all sell computer much more expensive them USA and with no good hardware. At most cases, dell, hp, ibm sells here 2 times more expensive than USA, that really sucks!

See ya!