Brands - Who's hot and who's not!

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kristel

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Okay - here are my oppinions:

Who's hot :bow:
Videologic - Always come up with some innovative products, and while their graphics cards won't win any awards for speed, they are good value for money. Their Sonic Fury soundcard is superb - I have the XG version and have never had such a splendid audio experience (bye bye Live!5.1). They have fantastic customer support - back in the days when I had no internet connection, they sent me out CDs with driver updates to solve my problems when rival Orchid wouldn't consider it. 5/5

Nvidia - People who designed my graphics card chipset (GF4 Ti4400). Constant supply of driver updates for most operating systems, stable card, innovative design. Customer service seemed trim and efficient. Lovely web site. Great company to deal with 4.5/5

AMD - Cheap and full of power, their processors are great but need treating properly or they will overheat. The only serious competition to intel at the moment. They really need a web site redesign. 4/5.

Dabs, Aria and Amazon - three online retailers that I've had good experience with. Very reliable. Aria's customer service is very good - one reply even had an emoticon in it :) 5/5 each.


And who's not :(

Creative Labs: Sorry but their customer support stinks. They seem to have no moral conscience telling them that they really should support consumers after sale, and I got badly burned when they refused to bring out propre windows 2000 drivers for their DXR3 DVD card. And now my DVD drive has stopped reading DVDs four days after the warrenty expired. Great. The only reason I have a creative graphics card is because I can use Nvidia's drivers. 2/5

Tiny: As above, after sales support was shocking. I learned my lesson and built my future PCs from scratch myself! 2/5


Has anyone got any more they'd like to add? I think it's useful to have some customer insights into brands / retailers before you buy :)
 
There is a section for the online retailers, check the little button on the right bar, I'm not sure if you have seen it, so I thought I'd point it out ;)
 
Moaning about Tiny

My fiancee and her family decided that they wanted to buy a ready built pc (god knows why!) and they did so from Tiny.
It has recently started overheating after they had BT's Home Highway installed for Internet connection, and her little sister Nikki decided that it was cool that she could download 10 songs at a time.

The family dont want anything doing to the computer, as it would void the warrenty, and so have been trying to contact Tiny. They havent even been able to get through on the telephone! The support from them is shocking, and their system is badly designed when thinking about heat.
 
Retailer comments added Ian :) Perhaps a company rate in general would be good, so we can rate customer service / support / quality of hardware from companies like Videologic, creative...
 
Yup, good idea :D

If you want you could put it in the "Feature Suggestion" page, its just under the retailer ratings icon - it will remind me to get working on it :D
 
Add Western Digital to the not hot list. My WD60gig crashed and then I had to reformat and lost all my stuff :angry:
 
The official Tiny (before Time bought the trading name only) was evil SoBs in my view, even the people who work in their stores didnt kno about the closure of the store until 9:30 the morning they closed down..

how did they find out that late you ask???

well the managers / area managers for the company Time Computers turned up on the doorsteps of the Tiny stores and said your closed go home basicaly...

so id say dont buy a tiny but seeing how the only way you can buy a tiny now is by going through the company Time its slightly different, now the Tiny machines are in a sence the lower branded Time machines so are good for the buget people but thats about the only good thing with them in my view.

and i work for them in my P/T job....
 
Tiny, Time and some Eversham models are notorious for over heating normally due to their bad layout. I used to work as Manager of an IT department and the Director wanted to use them cos they were cheap. The number of burnt out MB's processor and god knows what else was unbelievable, I was on 1st name terms with the returns department by the end of it lol.
Tiny and Time are also stinkers for MB stripping to save a penny on price. Not sure if thats still current but Ive seen alot in the not so distant past that had been stripped leaving no expansions from what you origionally got. But after all is saidand done, you pay for what you get and there dirt cheap normally.
 
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