Vendors With Good Post-Purchase Support?

ivo welch asks: "I purchased two computers for which the manufacturer never offered any real new software updates. Primarily, I would have liked good BIOS upgrades, but Windows 2000 support would be nice, too. In marked contrast, DELL and SAG seem to be pretty good releasing updates for machines even 2-3 years old. What are the experiences with other vendors? The differing post-purchase support has tilted my own purchase decisions towards DELLs in the future, even though I must admit Sonys are 'sexier'. Does this matter enough to anyone else? Should we communicate this to the vendors?" Which vendors stand by their hardware years after it's been outdated and which ones drop support 5-8 months after a specific model is released, forcing their customers to adopt a short and expensive upgrade cycle if they want any kind of support?

Comments

what matters to me

[ksheff]

What I want from a computer equipment manufacturer are the following:

• Hardware specifications available online as HTML or PDF documents for any piece of equipment they have made. I like it that I can lookup specs for an old Seagate hard drive or Mac that I can via ebay or yahoo. IMHO, auction sites increase the chance that old hardware may be bought and used by someone rather than being junked. Having good documentation for obsolete hardware is important if one is trying to make it useful again (isn't that one of the many beauties of Linux?).
• Software updates available for download. Since, I'm not one for throwing hardware away and like to upgrade when I can, I want the manufacturer to keep updating the software in their products if possible. For example, Celerons with cache initially caused the motherboard that I have to not boot. A simple BIOS upgrade fixed that and I would expect that for each processor that Intel makes that uses the Slot 1 interface, I would like the board manufacturer to make sure that its BIOS will work with it.
• Warranties with no-question replacement of defective parts. I don't want to buy something (a monitor for example) and then have it break in under a year. If it does, I want the company to replace it without having to jump through a lot of hoops.

I build most of my own systems, so I try to pick quality parts based on recommendations of friends & others on the web. Because I'm essentially providing my own support, I want the information/software to be able to keep my systems running for years. My brother had nothing but trouble with his Compaq. Not only did he have trouble with it breaking down a lot the first few months he had it, he had a heck of a time getting it fixed. Other friends have had good experiences with Gateway where if a part went bad, they would ship a replacement and have the user return the defective part in the same box without any questions.