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PC Reliability & Service: Things Fall Apart

For the straight story on mechanical breakdowns and vendor support, we polled 16,000 PC World readers and asked how their systems are holding up. The results are not encouraging.

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Overall Winners and Losers

It's lonely at the top. Of the nine companies we rate this time, only one PC maker scored high enough to rank as Outstanding: Dell alone earned this distinction, for both its Work and Home PCs. The good news: Overall, no companies rank below Fair. But that's not saying much. The bad news? Since our last report in January, we see no overall improvement. Some companies dropped down a tier: Gateway slipped from Good to Fair in Home PCs and Notebook PCs. Micron and Quantex took a similar fall in Home PCs, as did Hewlett-Packard in Work PCs. For some PC makers in our Home PCs and Notebooks groups, we received too few responses from readers reporting their service experiences, so we weren't able to rank those companies on our charts. We were, however, able to rate their reliability separately. For the reliability-only charts regarding CyberMax, EMachines, NEC, and Sony (Home PCs) and Acer, Fujitsu, HP, Micron, NEC, and WinBook (Notebooks), see "Other Companies: Reliability Ratings."

--Aoife McEvoy

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