“When LAPTOP went undercover a year ago to assess the quality of notebook tech support, we were pleasantly surprised by the relatively brief hold times and by how quickly first-level technicians grasped and solved our problems. This year, we wanted to compare how each of the nine major PC vendors improved, maintained, or lowered its service from a year ago. We were on alert for obvious foreign accents since some vendors outsource their tech support operations to Asian countries, and customer complaints about this issue are voluminous,” Michael S. Lasky reports for LAPTOP Magazine.
“Armed with a pair of questions, we called each notebook company twice, once between 12:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. PDT, and again during the traditionally high-volume call time between 5:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. PDT,” Lasky reports. “The first question posed was, ‘I have so many icons cluttering my system tray, but I can’t figure out how to make them go away without actually deleting the programs. What should I do?”‘ The second query was, ‘How do I defragment my hard drive?’”
MacDailyNews Note: We assume LAPTOP substituted “Dock” for “system tray” when calling Apple.
Lasky reports, “We based each vendor’s Web grade on availability of information and ease of locating it. Phone grades were based on wait times, quality of service, and how well our issues were resolved.”
Apple received an “A” grade in the Web, Phone, and Overall categories to go along with their overall “A” from last year’s test.
“All computer vendors have become quite strict about providing tech support only to registered owners during the first year of service. Apple is decidedly different: Free tech support is available for just the first 90 days from the date of provable purchase,” Lasky reports. Even though LAPTOP’s machine was over 6 months old, on both phone calls, Apple’s service techs answered LAPTOP’s questions anyway as a courtesy — in under a minute for each correct answer.
Full article, with grades for many other OS-limited manufacturers, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "RadDoc" for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Notes:
• About disk optimization with Mac OS X: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668
• Adding and removing Docked items with Mac OS X: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304728
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