Averatec. Dirt cheap and still my favorite machine. I've been using the 3200 for programming work for a few years, I abuse the hell out of my computers (both physically and in terms of asking it to do a hundred things at once) and this takes it with no problem. I don't game on it, so I couldn't say how it'd handle that, but it certainly runs Photoshop without trouble.

Every Dell computer I've seen has a tendency to crash. But none of them were mine, so I can't say whether they were all the cheapo models or not.

I've also borrowed a Sony Vaio a few times; not a fan, but that has more to do with the shape of it than anything else, it works all right.