Who Offers the Best Tech Support for Laptops?
You may not care so much about tech support for your desktop, but for a laptop it matters a bit more.
While many of you Tom's Hardware readers are usually savvy enough to troubleshoot problems on your own, even if it's store-bought computer, many consumers out there heavily factor into their purchases in the quality of tech support.
The presence of good tech support is even more important for laptops, which are harder to crack open and troubleshoot – especially if you want to hang on to that warranty. With the back-to-school laptop buying season heating up, it seems like a good time to see what sort of tech support you'll get from each major laptop maker.
Laptop Magazine has given various computer companies the annual secret test of laptop tech support, both over the web and over phone, at various times of the day.
As with other years, 'A' is for Apple as the company once again posts top marks. For Windows-based machines, the premium brands of Lenovo and Sony do fairly well both over the phone and online, but if you grab an Asus, be sure to call in.
Laptop Magazine describes its processes and experiences in great detail for each company, so hit up the full article for more.
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I wonder how they graded Apple's tech support? I thought they never, ever went wrong, ever....
lol. OS specific questions....
a mac hipster could have scored an A while geniuses working on the LHC that use linux would get an F because they don't work with Windows.
How about actual hardware questions like "how to change RAM on that laptop?"....if i want to know how windows works, ill call microsoft
I'd expect nothing less from Apple, what with their limited range of laptops/desktops. I bet Acer still gets calls for models over 10 years old
I have used apple support 3 times, twice for an issue where the battery would not work changed it with one which we know worked and the laptop was fine however instead of giving me a new battery, they had to send it off and then diagnosed it was a faulty battery, this took 3 weeks. A month later same issue again instead of sending me a new battery they had to send it off again for another 3 weeks and then diagnosed it as a battery problem and gave me a new battery.
Sony has been no better, brand new Sony Vaio about 3 hours old the screen stopped working. Sony said contact your seller, seller said once sold Sony are do all support. Sony said that they cant do any support until the device has been registered so we did, and advised that the laptop will have to be sent back for 6-8 weeks for repair. I questioned why a 4 hour old laptop which we have just spent £900 on will have to be sent off for 8 weeks why cant they just do a swap out? "Its because it has been registered, we cant do a swap out on a registered laptop"
The shop i bought it from would not swap it, so I got a full refund from the store and then bought another one same store.
That one has worked for 10 years and still going.
Just another Apple commercial sh*t.
A good thing to remember though is you can take your Macbook in to any apple store and have someone look at it, it may still need to go back to be repaired but thats no different to any other brand, they will even show how to use the laptop with free prebooked tuition which if you are a newbe to mac is very handy and not availible from any other manufacture, i'm sure a lot of other brands offer good tech support as well but lets not knock Apple simply because some on here dont like the company or its products.
Dell have always been great for business support, can't vouch for consumer though.
I'm surprised Sony scored so well. The others must be really poor to be beaten by them.