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Too much of a good thing can make you suspicious. If your kid offers to get you the newspaper and an iced tea, for instance, you wonder when he wants to borrow the Miata. And if prices at the meat market are too low, you might worry about the grade of the ground beef you're buying.

Plummeting PC prices can provoke a similar reaction. They've fallen so far so fast--35 percent in just three years, according to market research firm Dataquest--that some computer users wonder if manufacturers are using inferior components and laying off support technicians so they can sell PCs cheaply and still make a profit.

We would love to report that the results of our survey on the reliability and service of PCs show that the latest systems have few problems. But based on the responses of 30,490 PC World readers, we can't. To enrich this analysis, we combined the results of our latest survey with those from our July 2000 report and compared these numbers with the previous year's worth of data.

The results for reliability--such as how many problems a PC has each year or how likely a component is to fail--are mixed. While average scores were down for home PCs, work systems and notebook computers generally scored better. But in our measures of service--how long users waited on hold for a technician and whether their problem was ever resolved, for example--results were down across the board among home and work PCs, as well as notebooks. For a detailed breakdown of each company's ratings across our six reliability and six service measures, see our chart for work PCs, as well as the charts for home PCs and for notebook PCs.