HP or Dell

I've always leaned towards Dell for the simple reason that you can always refer to their tag number years down the road. HP, however, has so much junk loaded on it from the factory that there usually aren't any free IRQ's right out of the box leaving them hard to upgrade. Just my personal opinion and experience.

HP - Also known to most as Packard Hell... Their clones they build are buggy, no slots for expansion, tech support redistributed to local support due to the fact that they are based overseas ad not America anymore, and updates / bios / system setup is convoluted and tricky.

Dell - As stated above: Service tags - They will be on dells website for life. Great and easy to find / use updates. Next day tech support is just that - NEXT Day. No shipping pc's and waiting weeks. Extremely reliable and best tech support out of any PC Retailer.

Dell's Tech Support is significantly better. We always found that HP could make the simplest Keyboard or floppy replacement a pain in the butt. We switched from HP to Dell about 3.5 years ago and have about 3200 optiplexes in service. No regrets. We've been wined and dined by HP a couple of times since but we are sticking with Dell.

What about Compaw professional desktops.

Now with Dell, HP, IBM AND Compaq, the retail over the counter boexs aren't worth using in business, i have never seen a retail box perform well.
All of these companies also offer a full line of professional workstations and desktops.

My experience with all three has IBM leading in high end laptops, Compaq leade the pro-desktop market. Dell has good service but the techs aren't very useful and the parts need much to be desired.

Compaq = 5 years onsite replacement service included with pro-dektops and workstations.

Dell, will keep you employed with support calls, as will HP. IBM is a good product but I find Compaq desktops to be more stable.

As for ADDITIONAL software, DELL, HP, Compaq, IBM all include a presinstalled suite. Just clean out what you don't want. The biggest nightmare I've had is with HP's (especially retail boes) that have cheap garbage NIC's in them, as with DELL (dell often uses the Pro100 drivers but they are only barely compatible with the NIC cards and cause more headaches than it's worth.

In my eyes if you want a cheapo PC for the kids, Dell is great (and CHEAP). If you want a power workstation or dessktop, Compaq'a EVO series are a great build with quality hardware. If you need a stable and secure laptop, I'd go IBM.

HP/Compaq (yes - they are one now) are good, reliable machines as long as you buy their business desktops (Compaq EVO series). DO NOT buy their retail boxes, as they are, as others have said, junked up with lots of unnecessary stuff designed to make home users' eyes light up. Dell is great, too, although contrary to popular opinion I think their tech support sucks unless you are a relatively inexperienced home user who needs a lot of low-level hand holding. Their low-level boxes also tend to be junked up with lots of unnecessary stuff, so again buy the business-level stuff rather than the Dimensions that they advertise on TV for $499...Hope this helps!

This question was closed by the author