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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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Readers Rate Home PCs

Slip-slidin' away: The current state of home machines is worse than that of work PCs, according to our readers. Gateway, Micron, and Quantex all plunged from Good to Fair overall, due to substantial drops in their service scores (see "Overall Winners and Losers").

Within the individual measures, reliability scores dipped also--but not as much as service. Acer, Compaq, and Quantex dropped in overall reliability ratings: Quantex fell from Good to Fair because of the increase in its percentage of PCs with any problems, problems per year, and problems on arrival. Acer and Compaq both went from Fair to Poor--Acer's percentage of problems on arrival is rated as Unacceptable (just one star). Micron took a knock in five out of six reliability measures, but it still managed to cling to its overall reliability score of Good. Dell reigns as reliability king, scoring Outstanding or Good across all measures.

Meanwhile, service suffers. Half the companies saw their overall service score sink: Gateway, Micron, Quantex, and Dell (yes, even Dell) all dropped a notch. Gateway has troubling scores for "Short hold time" and "No resolution"--it loses two stars in each of these measures. Fewer Gateway customers say that their calls were picked up in 5 minutes or less, and a sizable percentage of people reported that their problems were never resolved. Micron takes a hit in all six service measures, and Quantex fares only a little better, taking a hit in three areas.

Big Blue improves a little in service--readers are happier with the time the company took to sort out snafus, and they say fewer of their problems were never resolved. Despite a decline in Acer's reliability, this PC maker rates higher on every single service measure (by a star) this time around, enabling it to move up a spot from Poor to Fair for overall service.

--Aoife McEvoy

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