Who Offers the Best Tech Support for Laptops?

Apple given an A? More like customers are simply deceived and blindly believe that they are receiving awesome tech support when in reality, they are not.

Asus and Lenovo as the only other companies to get an A in one or the other of the categories? Who paid for this study?

Acer is really much better outside the U.S. Acer stores are common in Asia where you can drop off a broken notebook and have it fixed under warranty within 1-2 days. Then pick it up when it's ready. Also getting support with a live person right in front of you is no problem - just a 15 min wait.

But yes I agree, Acer sucks in the States. I had to ship mine to Texas and pay for shipping when I had trouble in California. A complete system check was also just impossible.

Dell was awesome in the late Nineties.

Apple knows their fans are utter n00bs, so they give a top notch Tech Support :P

I needed servicing for two of my laptops this year. My mom's HP had a keyboard problem and spent 10 days at HP, before it was ready. My personal DELL studio had a CPU+MB broken last Wednesday. I received the computer in Friday (43 hours after leaving it for servicing) I have no idea how can you give HP such a grade. + it took me an hour to negotiate with HP on the phone before they admitted it should be a HW problem. Dell were much more friendly (of we can use that word) and only 10 after I called they asked me to send the computer for servicing. As a conclusion from my 2010 experience - good job for dell (and much better, compared to 2-3 years ago)

Ha... the good point is which machine is "foolproof", my laptop, being a budget business class off-lease, with printer/SP2/3/Bluetooth/Ethernet/Wi-Fi/chipset/Intel GMA driver, took better half of a day to brings up to speed from a pristine Windows XP to the loaded drive I bought initially; most laptops are already built strong. BTW it is HP.

Apple's machines are all foolproof.

I needed servicing for two of my laptops this year. My mom's HP had a keyboard problem and spent 10 days at HP, before it was ready. My personal DELL studio had a CPU+MB broken last Wednesday. I received the computer in Friday (43 hours after leaving it for servicing) I have no idea how can you give HP such a grade. + it took me an hour to negotiate with HP on the phone before they admitted it should be a HW problem. Dell were much more friendly (of we can use that word) and only 10 after I called they asked me to send the computer for servicing. As a conclusion from my 2010 experience - good job for dell (and much better, compared to 2-3 years ago)

Support packages are sold separately to give a more competitive price.

They bought a 90 day support package for Apple but not any of the other companies.
So many of the responses were, "I'm sorry, we don't provide software support, you must purchase that separately"

How can they rate a company on a product they didn't even buy?

"The presence of good tech support is even more important for laptops, which are harder to crack open and troubleshoot"

I would consider updating the text of this article.
It would lead a reader to presume the Tech Support referenced in the article was Hardware Tech support. It was not. It was "Windows 7" support.

While I agree that Hardware Tech support is very important, that was not reviewed. Furthermore, they were reviewing a service generally not provided by the Manufacturers. That is an Add-On fee, which is should be.

What I care about are Hardware issues.
Can they help troubleshoot real hardware issues.
Do they actually replace faulty hardware.
How long does it take?
I would even toss in how often does it break.

For all of these reasons, I often have a preference for Dell, whose warranties include home service. I've had issues such as failing fans, where I was able to continue to use my laptop while awaiting repair and did not need to send it in. Furthermore, the turn around time is small.
And I've never had a real hardware issue denied.

I did buy an Asus laptop about two years ago now, unfortunately I can't rate the company on anything other than it's a solid piece of equipment that still feels new despite heavy heavy daily use.

I find that Apple customer care isn't all that good anyway, I tried phoning them several times and everytime I try they seem to be extra busy or closed. How can a company producing "Good Products" have a tech support line be busy all the time?

@Tamz and most of the others.. This is not grading the damn stores. It's phone, and web. Specially tamz I'm sure if you asked the same people about any brand of their computers they wouldn't know the resolution so wtf does that have to do with apple. Freak even if it was an "apple store" you still can't compare.. Unless you actually talk to the tech people. The guys behind the cashier or just that cashiers or sales people depending where you go.

Of course to me this wasn't a good study. Was it done once with each product (phone and web) or was it done in the "hundreds". That makes a huge a differnce.

I think we can all agree this study is utter bull.

survey i say

Dell's corporate support must not have been included. I get warranty parts within 24 hours for desktops, and for our laptops, they come to my location and repair them. I also have phone support based in the USA.

Once again, in the light of an impartial study, Apple has emerged the leader in a key area of mobile consumer technology. And, once again the readers of Tom's Hardware completely dismiss the information out of hand.

Having jumped off the sinking PC ship a couple years ago, I can honestly say that the Apple has "The Absolute Best" notebook computers for sale today. Not to mention that with Mac OS X I avoided the Windows Vista disaster. Windows 7 still looks a lot like Vista to me, people who think otherwise are kidding themselves. Not that it matters, I will never buy a plastic, sticker covered, but ugly PC laptop ever again.

Now when someone tells me that they don't like the Macintosh, I have to ask them, "Have you ever owned a Macintosh?" When they say "No.", I politely say "...OKAY".

ignorance is bliss

service & support is important, it's how you keep your customers. which is partly why apple has so many loyal fans.

Tamz_mscApple with grade A? Are you kidding?A few months ago I visited their store and inquired about the macbooks.I asked them about the screen sizes available-they told me that 13, 15 and 17 inches were available.Then I asked about the resolution, and all of them gave me a blank look.I kept on asking every one of their representatives and in the end they handed over a catalog which is essentially the same as the tech specs on their website.So, I decided that I had enough of apple.

think the article is about tech support, not sales.