I get to spend a lot of time on the phone with tech support. In my humble opinion there is no quicker way to tank your business than to offer sorry technical support. It's probably better to offer NO technical support than to have a bunch of knotheads that can't be understood on the phone reading a script off a computer to help you repair a system. HP/Compaq hasn't figured that one out yet. Dell has.
Another thing that really torques me off is the tech support that promises something and doesn't deliver. TigerDirect did that to me last year and I went from doing thousands of dollars of business with them to practically zero last year. They really screwed me on a netbook deal. They advertised one thing on the net, and I jumped on it. Fortunately, I had dealt with them before and knew enough to take a screen grab of the offer. Sure enough, when I ordered the deal, they went back and changed the webpage, then they called me back and said I (really, my mistake, not theirs!), had made an mistake on the order and they won't supply it. If they would have just said whoops, we screwed up and we were wrong I would have accepted that, but nope, they blamed me. You should have heard the silence on the other end when I emailed my screen grab to the customer service rep. So, instead of admitting they were wrong and apologizing, the guy actually accused me of photoshoping the ad. Well there are a few things that you don't want to do to me. Never call me an SOB, don't insult my kids or my wife, and don't call me a liar. If I had had access to that turkey I'd probably still be in jail. That sort of crap gets a part of me riled up that I try real hard to keep buried.
Bottom line of all this rant is this . If you are going to buy an HP buy it from me. I'll deal with the ____'s. They do build a wonderful computer, in fact I think they are a scooch better than Dell on a value for the money level, but their customer support completely sucks. Otherwise, buy the Dell or if you are absolutely loaded and looking for a good place to throw down some extra cash, go ahead and get an Apple...Windows 7 is so close to Apple's OS now....