Last time I checked (a couple years ago) when I was shopping for a new PC, Dell was the only major brand that offered in-home service. Everyone else was carry-in or mail-in service.
Yeah but then you went with NT which was a much more solid and stable OS. I remember 95/98/ME (all were the same OS basically, with minor tweaks) crashing constantly.
Nowadays it is easy to get W7 for free and there is such a thing as dual boot, just to see which one you like better. I have them both on this laptop but W8.1 pisses me off all the time, I have been just too lazy to delete it... Occasionally I use its apps and that is about it...
Go to www.ninite.com install the classic tool bar then window 8 is bareable, day to day, finding setting control panel wise hateful but won't have to when setup. Just ignore the Metro crappola. Defo on the free upgrade to 10 mind, looks much better. Dell's are fine, sold 50+ over the years, they've all went 5+ years before having issues but out of date hugely anyway so not a real issue. Microsoft are like Star Trek films, 1 good then 1 bad, Vista and ME and 8 where aweful, 98, XP and 7 pretty damn good.
Memristors is possibly the next leap and it's coming SOON!! http://www.engadget.com/tag/Memristor/ 64bits in a single transistor I think, not to sure, the end of Binary processing.