I have not been particularly aware of brands in the PC and laptop world over the year apart from the makers of the component parts such as motherboards. I have pruchased parts and made my own PC's that may have an Asus or Gigabyte motherboard in them, but never bough a branded PC in a shop. This changed when laptops came along and between home and work PC's, I now have acquired some experience with two brands Acer and HP.
The experience so far with Acer has been very good value for money PC's that run silently, have a good set of features, and have been trouble free. My experience with HP has been they run with the noise of a jet plane, are poorer value for money, and have had failures which I have found out are manufacturing faults. So although HP might make a perfectly good laptop, ny experience based on two laptops is that they are a company that doesn't do as good a job of making laptops as their rival Acer.
I hadn't really thought about how this would effect a purchase decision until the other day when I finally decided to buy a replacement for one of the HP laptops while I got it repaired. i went into the shop thinking I would keep an open mind and look at all brnads based on prices and features. I had found myself in a shop on an initial visit screaming inside my head for another customer not to by an HP, so clearly I had crossed them off the list. I looked though at every other brnad and ended up buying an Acer again. The value for moeny poverall was between Acer and Asus for me, but my positive experience with Acer tipped the balance towards what I knew.
HP have taken a hit in my perception as a customers because their product had a fault at the point of manufacture. They could have rescued it (and possibly still will) by fixing the fault or replacing the laptop with a better one. They don't get the chance to replace it though as the retailer has to make that decision. I also realised I had used a different retailer, even though so far the repairs I had asked for had been done. This was partly to get a batter price, but was also because I don't want to have to argue with a retailer when I have to return a product. The new retailer may be no better, but at this point I don't know because I haven't had a problem with the Acer.
