Reliability and Service: The Best Companies to Buy From

How We Conducted the Survey

Working with Lynd Bacon & Associates of Belmont, California, and Research Results of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, PC World surveyed nearly 35,000 subscribers about their experiences with desktop and notebook PCs, printers, cameras, wireless gateways, and MP3 players. The online survey was open to our subscribers between May 1 and August 1, 2005. We limited respondents' reports to devices that were three years old or newer.

Lynd Bacon & Associates then used statistical analysis, including multivariate statistics and psychometrics, to determine which companies performed significantly better or worse than average across a number of measures.

In our charts, we arranged the companies with the most better-than-average scores at the top and those with the most worse-than-average scores at the bottom. When a vendor had both better-than-average and worse-than-average scores, we subtracted the worse-than-average scores from the better-than-average scores. When two or more vendors received the same number of average, better-than-average, or worse-than-average scores, we arranged the list alphabetically.