Hp
Cons: They use crappy hardware. They look for lots of ways to keep their systems base. For example they use something called an audio riser that boosts power out from their onboard sound to the speakers so they can get away with giving you cruddy unpowered speakers. They are also quite fond of using onboard anything. The components that they do not make are often from cruddy companies. I have seen them use some pretty crappy power supplies and a decent power supply is very important if you want your pc to last for any length of time. I am not very fond of their business practices either, I know some former employees that were either victims of layoffs they had there some years ago or quit on their end because they were fed up with the place. One of them was a programmer for them the other was on of their misc technitions that did a lot of their training (he was the one who had to train their future indian tech support teams).
Pros: Their high end laptops and digital cameras seem to be decent.
Dell
Cons: They will cut corners and short change you just like hp, only not as much so I will put this for a pro too, but I will word it differently. Their tech support sucks... I have talked to united states tech support workers in person and they seem to be on the ball but they have to work tandom with the indian departments and those indians are a pain in the butt to deal with. It is like pulling teeth to work with them... they assume every customer is an idiot and they read from a script and really do not seem to know what they are doing themselves... atleast this is what I have gathered from my experience with their tech support. From what I have heard it is only getting worse.
Pros:I like their construction. The way they have their systems setup. Working on a dell is usually very easy because of how their systems open and how they snap together. As for the parts, like I said before, they short change you... but atleast they are not as onboard happy as hp. They will give you a video card atleast (but it is a pos gefore2 or something most of the time... but that is slightly better than onboard). Also I have seen plenty of dell systems with an actual sound card instead of onboard. They tend to ship them with those harman/kardon speakers and I have a pair of those myself... those are pretty pimp, amazing sound quality. They also seem to make decent high end laptops.
But as far as pc quality vs. Price, both suck completely. They both mark the prices up quite a bit, the cost of the parts is substantially lower than the price of the system. Buying from a smaller vendor, maybe a local store that makes their systems, or building it yourself is a far superior rout.
As for who sucks less: Probably dell... but they still suck.
