I'm just like you...i used to have a Dell , upgraded to an HP win7 64 bit with an I5 processor & 4Gigs , and have had tons of hardware trouble with it;
i've had more blue screens of death with it than when i had Win98. I'm on my 4th hard drive that the system seems to corrupt during it's bluscreen death throes.
it's actually a pretty fast system witht eh 4 gigs of ram. but I've been tempted to scrap it and go back to a Dell again. based on my experience.
Lowell