Are all desktops the same?

They are not the same in my humble opinion. Although many of the technologies they implement are the same simply because many of them are standards based and in demand by consumers, their implementations vary. The support absolutely varies and I find that HO, especially in the sever category has an edge on all the others especially Dell.

Dell has slipped from my favor many years ago. Before the slip, I believed their support was one of the reasons to buy a Dell. When I was asked what new desktop computer should I get by someone, my reply was spontaneously "Dell". Now, that has been tainted as dell had tainted their support. They believed somehow that people would not notice the big shift and degradation of their support. They are trying to build it back up and are doing an OK job but it's going to take years to fix the problem. Outsourced support has hurt them, no doubt.

So during that dark era for me with Dell, HP was the desktop of choice. HP made and still makes a reliable compacted system with various level systems to suite business, home users, casual users, novelists, etc.

Since the time of this post (now 2022), Dell and HP are still manufacturing desktops and laptops. Gateway is not a thing anymore and IBM has gone to services after a nice run with Lenovo for laptops. I had one , still do, and it ran and still operated perfectly. Upgraded to Windows 10 just fine and getting more life out of it. It's not my main computer but used mostly as a table top computer for quick web searches or playing videos. 

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