A few weeks ago reader gripes about hardware vendors led us to pose the question of whether any hardware vendors these days have the quality in their products and support to be worth paying a premium price. But since we were talking about all kinds of PCs, reader comments soon made me realize we were dealing with a number of questions that each could use answers of their own. Corporate customers who buy in large volume of course have different support issues, for example, than do small businesses or individual purchasers. An even more important difference, though, might be developing when it comes to notebook computers as opposed to desktop PCs.

"Workstations are easy -- if you don't happen to have a first-class white box manufacturer locally, you can just roll your own," wrote one reader. "Laptops are where the real problem lies. Almost all of them are made in one of just a few factories in Taiwan, and they all use the same limited set of components. Dell and HP sell them like commodity items, and the service they give you reflects that. Any of the manufacturers will be happy to charge you more for a top-of-the-line model or an extended, but do they really deliver any value for that money?"

Lenovo's acquisition of IBM's PC business has contributed greatly to the reader angst about where laptop leadership is now to be found. "We have always been willing to more for a ThinkPad than a similarly configured notebook from another vendor," wrote one reader from a company with a history of buying Big Blue. "We knew they'd bend over backwards to keep us happy. I have no such faith in Lenovo, and it's not because it's a Chinese company. It's because they are only a PC business, so we have to expect they will wind up acting like all the other PC commodity suppliers."

Certainly, quite a few readers still put their faith in Apple. "I have two laptops -- a 3.5-year-old Mac and a 4-month-old Toshiba," wrote one such reader. "The Toshiba has been out for repair for two weeks now. The much older Mac has never been out for repair. This is what I typically expect in the Mac/PC debate. I have some experience in this issue. I was a network administrator at a pretty good-sized school for seven years. I had a couple of hundred Macs and a few dozen Windows machines on the network. I consistently found the Windows PCs more troublesome. My recent Toshiba annoyance has confirmed my now even-stronger preference for the Mac."

Of course, other traditional PC mainstays still have their fans, including a few we haven't heard much about lately on the GripeLog. "We have excellent results dealing with Micron (now MPC Computers) for our laptops," wrote one reader. "They are generally reliable as hell, and if we ever do have a problem, you call the 800 number, answer a few questions, and the next day there is a box at your office with a new laptop shell. Take out your hard drive, slap it in your new shell, and you're back up and running in about 5 - 10 minutes. The tech support guys seem to know what they are talking about as well; all of their suggestions are logical for the problems that you are having, instead of just running through some arbitrary script."

What really intrigued me though were the laptops vendors I wasn't so familiar with that readers mentioned as being worth a look. Manufacturers such as Falcon Northwest, PCs for Everyone, Polywell Computers, Sager Notebooks, Voodoo PCs, and WidowPC might not rank with Dell, HP, Toshiba and Acer when it comes to market share, but it would certainly be interesting to hear more about what experiences reader have had with them.

So let's see if we can find out how the product offerings and support of some of the lesser-known portable manufacturers stack up against the big guys. Come cast your vote in and post your comments about your favorite notebook computer vendor. Like all my GripeLog polls, the important thing isn't so much who gets the most votes as what we all learn that we didn't know before. In fact, the most important thing of all might be finding out which vendor we don't have listed in the poll to the right that we need to include next time. Identifying a good laptop vendor that we didn't know about will make the real winners of our poll you and me.

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