My mom kept buying dell computers.
We had a desktop that started getting bluescreens constantly and had problems connecting to the internet.
A laptop that actually came unsoddered in several places :/
Another laptop that was so slow right out of the box it was unimaginable. It had trouble starting up and usually took about 15 minutes to finish booting after getting past the login screen.
I would go for HP media laptops. They are suprisingly powerful, and are priced great. for $999 you can get an i7 2ghz with 1GB ati graphics and 8gb ram. Only problems is that it runs really hot.