The Notebook Award can be considered one of the Blue Riband categories in the survey. Few other hardware items require such a hefty investment and require such a successful combination of components working together, good build quality and ultimately, reliability.
As happened last year, our survey supported claims that notebooks are outselling branded PCs 60-40. That said, our survey also once again showed that more and more people are building their own PCs nowadays - they’re far from a dying breed.
After processing the results of 9290 notebook buyers we ended up with two winners: Asus retained its crown but was joined on the podium by Fujitsu. Asus wins thanks to 1000 customers giving the company top-rated customer Support: 80% of customers were Satisfied or Very Satisfied with it. Reliability was Very Good with 90% at least satisfied while customer Satisfaction was unsurpassed with 91% saying they’d buy from Asus again and 89% being happy with the Value provided.
Fujitsu’s customers have long known about the company’s phenomenal build quality and reliability which lives up to its ‘Japanese-manufactured’ credentials. Fewer people bought a Fujitsu notebook but, like Asus, 80% were at least satisfied with customer Support. However, it scored even higher in the Reliability stakes because although (like Asus) 90% were at least satisfied with Reliability, 67% were Very Satisfied compared to Asus’ 60% - enough of a disparity for Asus to drop a star. Again like Asus, 91% of Fujitsu customers would buy from the company again but 5% less were happy with the Value on offer. And so, with identical overall scores, it was impossible to separate the these two very worthy winners.
Apple wins a Highly Commended award. It matched the best in terms of Reliability and customer Support. However, it was noticeably behind in terms of Satisfaction thanks to relatively-low Value For Money scores. Apple only managed five stars because, unsurprisingly, 92% of Mac users would buy another one.
Elsewhere, Dell finished fourth with generally Very Good results although 20% fewer customers were Very Satisfied with Reliability than were Fujitsu customers which led to a four-star 'Good' rating.
Worryingly, Lenovo’s scores dropped noticeably from last year: 18% of customers said they wouldn’t buy from Lenovo again and only 68% said they were happy with Value. But with around 80% of customers happy with Reliability and Support it’s not all bad.
Sony’s scores were troubling. We’ve raved about its notebooks all year (its G-series won our coveted Most Wanted Hardware editorial award). However, only 66% were happy with Customer Support and Value and 23% said they wouldn’t buy from Sony again.
But we were even more concerned about the scores from Compaq and Acer. These big brands should not be so far off the pace (as they were in last year's survey). Could these brands be shaving money off their support and manufacture bills in order to achieve their super low prices?
Support issues
We also measured what people complained about specifically with regards to Support. Around 4% of all buyers had difficulty getting through to sales people. But 9% had trouble getting through to tech support with this rising to 15% for Sony and 13% for Acer. Only 5% of LG users and 6% of Lenovo and Apple users had such problems though.
