Hardware vendors to avoid
There are a lot of opinions out there of which hardware vendors are good and which are not. What are the best hardware vendors to trust for company use?
- Server-grade: esp. harddrives and backup solutions
- Desktop-grade: any/all components but esp. focused on common desk workers though that are using MS Office, the web, a few internal apps, and little else. Not graphic designers, developers, or power users -- their needs are too specialized for something like this
My company (and I assume we're not unique) focuses on desktops being middle of the road but reliable. Downtime is very very bad -- time is money. Likewise with server grade stuff although they're more willing to spend some real money on quality servers.
This is not intended to start a war or be argumentative If you have real information or experience please share. And please support it with FACTS when possible
I want to point out that stuff changes over time. Let's take Hard Drives for a moment. Back in the day, everyone recommended IBM, because they had excellent reputation and a big name. Until the Deathstar series came out. Whoops. Another good name was Fujitsu, had a big reputation in their laptop drives. Sadly, they also had their issue with Desktop Drives, namely the PB16... Ok, so it's Seagate then - their 7200.11 is good, right? Then, what about Western Digital? Samsung? They also had their shaky series.
I've recently seen RAID-Arrays where the vendor consciously chooses hard drives from three different brands, so if an entire series of a vendor is faulty, it does not hit that hard. Of course, StorageReviews etc. are good places to check longlivety, but obviously if you're reading a "6-Month-Stress Test" article, the hard drive in question is at least 6 months old and may not be current anymore.
Long story cut short: Many Vendors have a bad series once in a while, especially when it comes to storage.
Oh boy, this is a fun answer. My company does desktop/laptop computer repair, and we also do a lot of computer assembly. I keep very good records about what goes bad in our shop, and here is what my spreadsheet say:
1) Stay away from the HP Pavilion line of laptops that start with "DV" nearly half our laptop repair business (that is, physical repair, bad motherboards etc) is done in DV5000/DV6000/DV9000 computers.
Statistic - So far this year we have replaced 19 laptop motherboards. Of those, 10 were DV5000, DV6000 or DV900 models. Almost all had bad graphics chips.
2) Stay away from EMS motherboard, we frequently find them bad, even in relatively young (2-3 year old) desktops.
3) Stay away from Foxconn motherboards for the same reason, we frequently find them going bad even in very young machines.
Statistic - We have replaced 35 desktop motherboards so far this year. Of those, 28 were EMS or Foxconn. Two were Asus, 5 were MSI. I think I may have a dead MSI coming in later today, but we'll see.
4) Dell Inspirons last forever. We see huge numbers of 4-6 year old Inspirons (600, 600,. 6000, 1505, 1705, etc) that have bad hard drives, but are in otherwise good condition. We see very few similar HPs (the ZE series, early Pavilions) that have lasted that long.
Statistic - We stock the most common Dell and HP power adapaters. In as far as the purchase of power adapters gives us a sense of the popularity and longevity of a machine, I have so far this year sold 15 adapters for older dells, and only 3 for older HPs.
Those are the most amusing/immediately apparently statistics I have for you, enjoy!
I agree with Michael Stum. However, I remember that HP Laserjets manufactured in the late 90s were all but indestructable and they will forever have a place in my heart because of that.
I've worked for a couple of companies that bought hardware from vendors just before they went out of business. Because it was cheap.
Bad move, don't do it.
There was no support, no warranty, no nothing. But no matter how loudly I said this, management wouldn't listen.
I've never had good luck with Lexmark Printers. Where I used to work we had nearly a dozen models that got returned or repaired with high frequency. Luckily in those days most users were still used to generally crappy reliability from their hardware so not every printer had to be returned. At the time Epson and HP had much better products in terms of reliability.