Reliability and Service: The Best Companies to Buy From

What the Survey Measures Mean

Reliability Measures

Any Hardware or Software Problem (All Devices): Based on the percentage of survey respondents who reported any problem at all during their product's lifetime.

Problems on Arrival (All Devices): Based on the percentage of owners who reported that a device had some sort of problem right out of the box.

Failed Component (Desktop and Notebook PCs): Based on the percentage of owners who reported replacing one or more original parts that failed.

Dead Peripheral (Printers, Cameras, Wireless Gateways, and MP3 Players): Based on the percentage of people who reported that they had a problem serious enough to make their device unusable.

Failed Core Component (Desktop and Notebook PCs): Based on the percentage of respondents who reported a failure of a CPU, motherboard, system memory, power supply, graphics board, or hard drive.

Product's Ease of Use (Printers, Cameras, Gateways, and MP3 Players): Based on the owners' rating, on a seven-point scale, of the ease of working with the device and with any accompanying software.

Satisfaction With Reliability (All Devices): Based on the owners' rating, on a seven-point scale, of their satisfaction with the reliability of a device.

Overall Reliability (All Devices): An overall score that weighs some of the more serious individual reliability measures (such as a failed core component) more heavily than others (such as ease of use).

Service Measures (Desktop and Notebook PCs Only)

Phone Hold Time: Based on the average time a brand's owners reported waiting on hold to speak with a tech-support rep.

Phone Rating: Based on the cumulative score from a question in which we asked brand owners to rate, on a seven-point scale, several aspects of their experience in phoning the company's tech support. Among these were whether the information was easy to understand and whether the support rep spoke clearly.

Failure to Resolve Problem: Based on the percentage of a brand's owners who said that their problem was not resolved to their satisfaction.

Service Experience: Based on the cumulative score from a question in which we asked brand owners to rate, on a seven-point scale, important aspects of their service experience.