Dell - sweet

We've been using an old Dell laptop of mine as our autobuild machine.  I've had it for almost three years...it seemed like it was on its last legs:  the battery doesn't hold a charge, the touchpad no longer worked, some keys are missing, the hard-drive is fragmented to hell.  Just a few days ago the screen went out.  I went to their online support chat, not expecting much - a Dell desktop that I had for less time melted down and I simply had to replace it - but they told me I still had a couple weeks left on my warranty, and they sent a tech to fix it.  (And they fixed the touch-pad to boot.)  I vaguely remember now - when ordering the laptop, through work, there was some discount if I got the long service plan that made it seem worth it.  (I'm normally a "For God's Sake Don't Get The Service Plan!" guy.)  Getting it fixed was so unbelievably painless, such the complete opposite of my horrendous experience with the company formerly known as Hewlett-Packard, that I'll probably go with Dell for all my computing needs in the future...and get the service plan.

Comments

[Brett Douville]

Ditto on Dell -- I bought a Dell desktop almost three years ago along with a service plan. Recently one of the hard drives in my RAID started showing some problems -- although it took a little while with tech support (and a whole lot of time running a diagnostic) to sort it out, they ended up sending out a guy with a new motherboard and drive (just in case the problem was with the hard drive controller). He installed the parts, was in and out in around an hour.

[Amit Batra]

Even though there is no doubt that the quality of the notebook computers that Hewlett Packard manufactures is reasonably good (though not excellent), as a brand new Hewlett Packard customer I can say with confidence that the entire experience of trying to buy a Hewlett Packard notebook computer was terrible.

A pathetic website filled with obsolete and incorrect information, lack of models to choose from and customize, and a completely unresponsive Direct Sales team are some of the obstacles that I had to experience while buying a Hewlett Packard notebook computer.

To read the full story, please visit http://hpindia.blogspot.com/.