They went through a phase where they were crapola. I bought an Inspiron 6400 laptop about a year ago.
The only problems I've had were:
Two little rubber feet on the bottom fell off. I emailed dell asking them to post two more out to me. The got me to email them a photo, they then sent out a technician to stick on the two little rubber feet for me. Kinda overcompensation, but oh well.
The two screws that hold the hdd in have gone missing now, but the hdd doesn't fall out. Shouldn't be hard to replace, but the thing isn't loose, so I'm not worried.
My older dell, a desktop is about 6 years old and still going strong, serving my little work office nicely (mainly only producing word documents, scanning, printing, emailing etc). It's a bit slow now ... but it's still powering on.