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You or your company paid good money for your computer or laptop. As part of the deal, you're entitled to the manufacturer's help in your computer's hour of need. But far too often, you don't get that help, according to the results of our latest survey on PC reliability and service. In one of the steepest declines we've seen in the eight years we've been surveying readers, service has deteriorated on every measure we track.

Our 27,000 survey respondents tell us that when their machine breaks, they wait on hold longer to talk to a technician, the techies seem to have less know-how, and the companies take longer to fix the problem. Worse yet, many readers never have their problems resolved.

In the ten months since we published our last report, service has turned lean, if not mean. The only good news is that PCs aren't breaking down any more often now than in the past. Readers say they've run into fewer problems each year, and most users are generally satisfied with their desktops' and notebooks' reliability.

Where Has Good Service Gone?

While reliability has remained about the same, the numbers we gathered on the service front tell a very different story. Support has declined significantly for work and home desktop computers and for notebooks. And less than half of the people who participated in our survey reported that they were very satisfied with the service they received.

Take Charles Tator, a technician with Unisys in Long Island, New York. Tator knows what it's like to be stuck with an unresolved problem. About a month before the one-year warranty on his Compaq Presario expired, the system's modem started acting flaky: It would disconnect him from the Internet, and at various times, his machine would freeze. He switched ISPs, but that didn't help. Tator e-mailed Compaq to explain his problem and the fixes he had tried, but Compaq's reply--which arrived within 24 hours--did him no good, he says. "I received an automatic response saying it could be the [phone] line, it could be the ISP," recalls Tator. "But I had already tried a second ISP."

Tator called Compaq and waited 45 minutes on hold, only to be told that his warranty had expired. Since he had e-mailed Compaq before his warranty was up, Tator argues, the company should have taken care of the problem and sent him the inexpensive part. It refused, so he replaced the modem himself with a new $59 unit, which corrected the problem. "This cost them," Tator says. "Since then, our family has bought two more PCs--an HP and an IBM. We're not getting Compaqs ever again."

Compaq feels that Tator's experience was atypical. "With online support, our goal is to have a technician respond by e-mail within 30 minutes," says Steve Young, Compaq's vice president of worldwide customer care in the access business group. "We are reaching that goal." When Tator ran into problems during the phone call, says Young, it was probably because the technician didn't have access to the e-mail transactions to find out what had happened prior to then. "We're almost finished rolling out a new system that will capture all communication channels," says Young. This will let techs view the entire history of a customer problem, he adds.

Compaq has registered some of the worst declines in service, according to our survey, but it's hardly alone. All the big computer brands we rated have seen their service scores drop. That said, the majority of respondents still had positive experiences. (We received too few responses from users of various smaller manufacturers' PCs to include ratings for these companies in our report.)

Based on our readers' reports, no vendor scored high enough to earn a rating of Outstanding. Even Dell, the perennial star of our survey, shines less brightly than before. Though the company still sits at the top of the overall rankings for home and work PCs and for notebooks, its vaunted customer service is clearly slipping. Specifically, Dell customers' calls to tech support were not picked up as quickly on average, plus a bigger proportion of home PC owners were left with unresolved problems. In past surveys, Dell regularly finished well ahead of the pack, but now it has lost much of its advantage over Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and local retailers. (For our previous survey's results, check out the January 2001 story "In Search of Trouble-Free PCs.")

The worst offenders? Compaq and Emachines--both rated Poor for their home PCs--languish at the bottom of the heap. For a detailed breakdown of each PC maker's scores on six reliability and six service measures, see the charts for work PCs, for home PCs, and for notebooks. For the first time, we tracked responses from readers who own PCs built by local stores. Local retailers are ranked together in one group. In the home PC and work PC categories, local retailers did fairly well on service measures. See the charts for more details.

Laurianne McLaughlin is a freelance writer based in Massachusetts. If you have a gripe with your PC maker, or you want to applaud your service experience, contact us at onyourside@pcworld.com.