Yeah I reformatted mine and installed my own OS, in regards to upgrades I can slap in 4 gigs of ram , bigger drives, new cpu it's not bad at all for upgrading least the model I have, which is dimension 8300... only part that keeps me stuff on upgrading is the MOOBO/CASE... everything else in it I could slap onto a standard mobo just fine... Just don't have no purpose to right now.... i use to like the butterfly style case but it's just a pain in a the *** to work with now specially where I have it on my comp desk gotta keep moving crap and unhooking everything to get to it...

 

Our office (150+ people) uses Dell. I think corporately we use Dell as well (we are a world-wide company). I haven't had any problems with the one I use. I hear about the odd hard drive taking a dump here and there but its rare. Our IT guy doesn't seem to have a problem with using Dell.

 

I'm not a big fan of Dell computers, but I will say this.

I work at an Oil refinery which is in the middle of a $100M+ upgrade where we are taking out all the old control system, and upgrading to a new DCS system to control production (and everything else) in the plant. And guess who they chose to supply the computers to run the refinery...yep, Dell. I was shocked, but if major oil companies are willing to risk billions of dollars at the helm of Dell computers, they would probably suit my needs just fine...