Failure Rate of PC Manufacturers?

The ever-popular Anonymous Coward asks: "Hello. We are conducting a write-up for our clients, however we cannot seem to locate any published failure rate of PC manufacturers. Google does bring up past PC Magazine articles - but nothing recent. Does Slashdot know of a way to find this information, as this strikes me as valuable information for the computer buyer. We sell many PC's (B3 VAR) and have done for the last 5 years. We can and will produce our failure rate info - why aren't the big companies doing so?"

Comments

Re:Google for "success rates"...

[duffbeer703]

I worked at a place that sold the first retail PC under $500 in college. Some Packard Bell 300Mhz Cyrix thing.

Our store sold about 3,000 of them (they were stacked in a big pyramid in the middle of the store and sold out), and ended up getting over 1,200 back due to defects of some sort.

We actually rented a warehouse to handle the repair of them, and while trying to cannibalize parts (as getting warranty parts took about 3 months) we noticed that each machine had different parts. Some had top of the line memory (PC100 i think), others had old SIMMs with DIMM adapter thingys.

PB literally stuck whatever was in parts bin in these machines. Absolutely amazing!

Re:White Box

[tengu1sd]

My point is that even with a Gold service contract your company staff will still wind up servicing the box and telephone troubleshooting to your vendor's script of the day. Better to have a local parts stock than to waste the time with a big company. If it's under service you get it swapped right there, if you need a new one, it's in stock and in hand. Your tech staff will wind dealing with the problem, why pay extra for scripted support?

At my last job we had 2 white box shops down the road. We picked the nice family run place and bought most everything there. We steered our customers to the same place and worked out standard configurations. Everyone is happy.

After being swallowed by Fortune 50 company we had to use standard corp-rat ordering and buy from the big name vendor. New equipment doesn't work, standard configurations aren't available from week to week. "Next day" support means a week or more to get working replacement part. Telephone troubleshooting takes longer than the walk down the block. Did I mention how frustrating telephone support scripts are?

Tandem FT

[rlp]

When I worked at Tandem in Austin, all systems were built, run through a complete set of diagnostics and soak testing before shipment. The systems were designed as fault-tolerant and sold mostly to the telecom industry. The goal was zero defects and to NEVER ship a DOA system. Tandem's systems were expensive, and the company competed on quality, not on price. Need I add that Tandem no longer exists as an independent company. (Bought by Compaq, which was bought by HP).