Re: Where does a former Dell customer go?

Hi!

I know before they sold their PC division to Lenovo, IBM was excellent
to dell with.

When I called technical support for a bad battery replacement on a Lenovo
3000 N100 laptop, I got IBM on the line. It came as something of a surprise.
I spoke to someone in the southern US, and the problem was taken care of
right away.

I would be remiss not to mention that somehow the defective battery never
made it back to them, or got lost in the shuffle somewhere. It took some
effort on my part to convince them that I really had returned the battery as
they asked and that I should not be charged for it.

Of course those were the days when Dell support was also quality.

Buy from the small business store. It really does help, and so far as I
know, that still holds true today.

Apple is producing exceptional quality product.

In some ways. I like their hardware and I hate it at the same time. I carry
a black Macbook running in a dual boot configuration with me when it's
needed on service calls, and it has held up very well since I bought it in
late 2006.

On the other hand, Apple Computer's products are why I own such an extensive
set of precision tools. You'll need one--and steady hands--if you decide to
work on an Apple product (especially a laptop) yourself.

Apple support

....is great until your computer is under its hardware warranty but has
passed beyond its complimentary support period. I ran into that wall when I
found the restore discs shipped with my Mac mini were bad. I *knew* that was
the only problem, and yet I had to put up with crap from Apple technical
support all the way, including one statement that basically amounted to an
accusation of my "stealing" from them by not wanting to pay their $40 charge
when I didn't need to have the problem diagnosed.

I did eventually get discs from Apple, but that was much later and only
after I'd decided that my life was too short for that kind of crap and had
an independent Apple dealer burn me a set of replacements...something they
neither profited from nor charged for!

(Yeah, I know. I'm just one person and the above is something of a rant.)

Regarding HP.

HP has already gone down the path of poor quality in my book. I've seen what
they've done with their home and business lines, and I don't like it. I see
more of them with hardware failures than I do anything else. A late model
HP-Compaq Deskpro crossed my path some time ago and the "HP engineering"
inside it was sloppy...they slapped a generic motherboard into a small form
factor case, slapped an "HP engineering" logo over the real motherboard
model, arranged the cooling so poorly that the system had several fans, and
ignored all the slots on the motherboard and put a riser card into one of
them to make it fit the case.

Compared to the much nicer Compaq Deskpro EN and Evo D500/510 systems, that
thing was a piece of junk. Its power supply finally went bang and put it out
of its misery.

I don't think Dell has crossed that point quite yet, but they have become a
lot cheaper and more generic in recent times.

Perhaps Gateway (who I could write much negative about as well) is
on the right path. They don't try to hide that they use Asian factories
to build their retail products cheap

I don't see a lot of Gateway equipment cross my path. What I do find out
there are older machines that are still in use, or some newer machines that
seem to be more eMachines at heart than Gateway. All of them have more
software than hardware issues.

I don't have anything against eMachines, other than possibly use of cheap
Bestec power supplies. I was skeptical at first, but I have both new and old
ones that keep on going strong with only minimal maintenace needs.

you're taken care of promptly and it's from someone who speaks
English clearly and can relate to your from not only language stand
point, but also culturally.

That is true, to the best of my knowledge. At one point, Gateway was making
a point of that as a distinguishing factor in a very crowded marketplace.

The later is of course greatly overlooked, but very important to
the human element of support.

I'm not sure I agree.

My new strategy is one forced upon me.

Ever thought of building one yourself? If you can handle a screwdriver and
have some common sense, you can do it. I've come back to building some of my
own PCs in recent times, after shying away from doing so from the point of
transition where baby AT boards gave way to the first ATX boards.

William


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