COMPUTERS : Survey Puts Spotlight on Repairs, Reliability

Anyone who gets into personal computing for peace of mind is probably missing a piece of his mind--veterans know computers always break when needed most.

But some widgets break more often than others. And some companies are better at service than others. So which?

The Sept. 25 issue of PC Magazine answers that with a special issue focused on a 25-question survey it sent to readers in March. The magazine, which focuses on MS-DOS machines, got 18,673 answers for the 700,600 copies of the questionnaire it sent. Some highlights:

Sixty-eight percent of the respondents with a desktop PC said their machine had been “impaired or unusable” sometime over the previous 12 months. Of that 68%, four out of five said they would buy again from the same manufacturer. Ninety percent of that same group said the desktop computer met their original expectations, and 88% said it meets their current needs.

So they bought a machine that they expected to break, it didn’t disappoint them, and they like that so much they’d do it again?

Of those with laptop computers, 75% reported them impaired or unusable sometime in the last 12 months, yet 77% would buy again from the same manufacturer.

For printers, monitors, hard disks and graphics boards, the percentage of respondents with machinery breakdowns in the last 12 months ranged from 65 to 73%. But never less than 77% of the respondents said they would buy again from the same manufacturer.

Clearly, there’s a good shot at a doctoral thesis titled “Masochism and Home Computing: It Hurts So Good.”

With things breaking down so much, repairs get in the spotlight. PC magazine said 19% of its respondents most often did their own repairs and felt pretty good about it, giving themselves an 87-point satisfaction rating on a scale of 1 to 100. The retailer who sold the gizmo and the manufacturer who made it were the source for 12% and 11% of the repairs, respectively, but score only 69 and 67 on the satisfaction scale.

On an overall manufacturers’ reliability scale of 100, the readers who responded rated Hewlett Packard at 96, NEC at 94 and seven at 92 (AST, Dell, Everex, IBM, Intel, Swan and Tandy.) Looking at the brand names identified by the respondents gives a picture of what’s out there. IBM leads the pack with its logo on 3,188 of the machines owned by those who answered the survey. The rest of the top 10 included Compaq, CompuAdd, Northgate, Dell, AST, Tandy, Zenith, Gateway 2000 and Leading Edge.

The survey results fill an issue of a magazine usually thick enough to double as a doorstop, and the information gets down to the nitty-gritty by manufacturer and product. While it’s obviously MS-DOS oriented and the responses reflect individual opinions, anyone buying a PC, monitor, hard drive, printer, laptop or graphics board would do well to invest a couple of hours reading the relevant articles.