Originally posted by ionas
well the question is what vendors are left for professional company usage regarding pcs?
dell? no
gateway? no
ibm? yes
sony? no
sun? no
hp compaq? yes
apple? yes, of course, but only if you do not have to stick to windows cause of your customers, but even then, vpc helps out in many cases.
there arent so many possibilites...
I am not sure why you think Dell isn't viable for companies... as much as I dislike their business practices in general, they make it very easy to purchase and track large quantities of PCs in a work environment.
In my admittedly limited experience (a few hundred PC purchases every few years) I have been most turned off by IBM. They took forever (more than 90 days) to deliver my first order of 20 or so Intellistations. They delivered the wrong type of machine on my next order, and after treating me with disrespect when forced to correct their own mistake, they delivered yet another incorrect model. To top it off, they were unable to answer simple questions about their systems' BIOS configuration until I got to a manager at senior level tech support, who confirmed a bug that disallowed booting from a USB floppy disk but couldn't give me a time frame for a fix. So much for booting from a floppy for imaging. Thank god for PXE servers. It then took an act of congress to get them to mail me a CD copy of the OS, because instead of including it with the system on CD, they hide it on a partition on the drive that the "restore utility" reads it from in an emergency. When I explained to them that I wipe the drives clean upon arrival so I can image them, they sounded confused. How is this a viable company for businesses to use?
Gateway tries very hard, and their profile series is OK for a PC all-in-one. They are merging with eMachines though which scares me.
Dell has consistently had my orders delivered correctly within a week of being placed, and they undercut everybody else on price. To top it off, they have specialized US based tech support for large customers. They also call back when they say they will.
Apple tech support is always the worst that I have to deal with. Most recently, they tried to tell me that getting Netboot to work on an Xserve was somehow outside the realm of my premium tech support contract, when their own documentation was so flawed that making it function was impossible. Hello? They make the hardware and the software. Who can they legitimately blame it on? The Xserve itself took over 6 months to be corrected, and they made me sign a non disclosure agreement so I can't even talk about why it took so long. The Xserve is still sh*t with SCSI, which makes me wonder how they expect to be taken seriously with their business class machines.
When I dealt with Compaq, I always got top notch tech support from their Proliant team. Those people routinely mailed me CDs with customized configurations of their server management apps. at no charge. I haven't bought from them since they were eaten by HP, but HP did a great job with delivering large shipments of identical PCs when I used to deploy hundreds of Vectras at a time. No hardware changes without warning halfway through a product run.
Hmm...
So what was the question again?
