From: David Ross (ross_at_math.hawaii.edu)
Date: Sun May 03 1998 - 00:25:55 EDT
>thing... in support, Dell is the best, Wintel is the worst... IBM is th most
>aggravating because of the long delays, arrogant telephone staff and
>extremely expensive fixes... so I cannot believe your comment that my
>exeriences are "different that most laptop owners..." Look at all the
>published suveys
Well, the first 3 surveys I ran across on the internet don't agree with you. Both a PC World survey:
http://www.pcworld.com/hardware/desktop_pcs/articles/mar96/1403p192-1.html
and a very recent PC magazine survey:
http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/perfectpc/surveypc/notevend.htm
put IBM quite high (not better than Dell or Micron or Gateway, but all in the roughly the same ballpark, depending on the survey). So did a Windows magazine survey from last fall
http://www.winmag.com/library/1997/0801/featu127.htm
though this was predominantly for desktop systems.
I've had my own major problems with IBM support, including a downtime of several weeks on one machine, so I don't mean to defend them blindly, and I entirely agree that they are often annoying and rude on the telephone. I've also never tried to get an IBM serviced out of the warrantee period.
However, one thing I really appreciate about the machines is that (1) the problems eventually do get resolved, or the defective machines replaced, and (2) they maintain support of older machines, and do a good job of posting support files and fixes online. (By contrast, I have a Micron Transport with APM and video incompatibilities with IE4 which they never intend to resolve - though they're quite nice on the phone when they say this:-)
David A. Ross
ross_at_math.hawaii.edu
www.math.hawaii.edu/~ross
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