Who Offers the Best Tech Support for Laptops?
While many of you Tom's Hardware readers are usually savvy enough to troubleshoot problems on your own, even if it's store-bought computer, many consumers out there heavily factor into their purchases in the quality of tech support.
The presence of good tech support is even more important for laptops, which are harder to crack open and troubleshoot – especially if you want to hang on to that warranty. With the back-to-school laptop buying season heating up, it seems like a good time to see what sort of tech support you'll get from each major laptop maker.
Laptop Magazine has given various computer companies the annual secret test of laptop tech support, both over the web and over phone, at various times of the day.
As with other years, 'A' is for Apple as the company once again posts top marks. For Windows-based machines, the premium brands of Lenovo and Sony do fairly well both over the phone and online, but if you grab an Asus, be sure to call in.
Laptop Magazine describes its processes and experiences in great detail for each company, so hit up the full article for more.
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's machines are all foolproof.
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?
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.
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.
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".
think the article is about tech support, not sales.