Being the owner of a 3 year old Dell Inspiron 9400 (E1705 in the US) I would have to agree. There's nothing physically wrong with it, and it performs as good as ever. However, the rubber grips came off the bottom due to excess heat being transferred through them, which is Dell's problem as the fans don't run in it until the CPU temp gets past like 50C so the entire metal case starts acting like a heat sink.
Problem two is that with the rubber grips gone (I've replaced them, but I've yet to find any of similar quality so I'll pick up my laptop and the damn things are adhered to the table because it's heated them so much the vinyl surface adheres to paint or varnish) the bottom of the laptop has started losing paint. The plastic shell is fine, sadly it also has metal casings to protect the ram slot, which is now incidentally a nice chrome.
There's also multiple other problems I've noticed through prolonged use of the Inspiron. Note these are nothing I'd dump a $3000 laptop over, however the next laptop I buy is going to be a macbook. The most annoying problem is if you don't close the lid properly, like you're just picking up your laptop to move it while still in use, it can turn off the screen but as it didn't fully close it won't turn on without a hard reboot. Another problem is that Dell doesn't supply up-to-date drivers; Intel released updated drivers for multiple things, including an overhaul of the built-in GPU making it compatible with more games and improving the shader emulations making the thing run a whole lot faster. In fact it improved it so much I stopped using my desktop for games as my laptop got better refresh rates. Sadly I had to uninstall the Intel drivers shipped through Dell and install the Intel ones manually. Obviously the few crash occourances Intel patched weren't important enough for Dell to bother testing and it still hasn't been released.
So even though I do love my Dell as it's served me extremely well. I would just prefer more quality for the price.
Problem two is that with the rubber grips gone (I've replaced them, but I've yet to find any of similar quality so I'll pick up my laptop and the damn things are adhered to the table because it's heated them so much the vinyl surface adheres to paint or varnish) the bottom of the laptop has started losing paint. The plastic shell is fine, sadly it also has metal casings to protect the ram slot, which is now incidentally a nice chrome.
There's also multiple other problems I've noticed through prolonged use of the Inspiron. Note these are nothing I'd dump a $3000 laptop over, however the next laptop I buy is going to be a macbook. The most annoying problem is if you don't close the lid properly, like you're just picking up your laptop to move it while still in use, it can turn off the screen but as it didn't fully close it won't turn on without a hard reboot. Another problem is that Dell doesn't supply up-to-date drivers; Intel released updated drivers for multiple things, including an overhaul of the built-in GPU making it compatible with more games and improving the shader emulations making the thing run a whole lot faster. In fact it improved it so much I stopped using my desktop for games as my laptop got better refresh rates. Sadly I had to uninstall the Intel drivers shipped through Dell and install the Intel ones manually. Obviously the few crash occourances Intel patched weren't important enough for Dell to bother testing and it still hasn't been released.
So even though I do love my Dell as it's served me extremely well. I would just prefer more quality for the price.