Any special service for the PCs your company bought?

Question

When your company purchase computers, does it have a service contract with the company it bought the computers from?

What is the service contract about?

Answer 1

This depends a lot on the size of the company.  If you are a large enough buyer, the company (such as HP, Dell, etc..) will assign you a Service Rep who will pay attention to your needs proportionally to the value of the contract to them.  A large company I worked for had onsite next day service from Dell on all desktops.  Another company, smaller, that I worked for, couldn't get much more than the name of their HP rep, because the value wasn't enough for HP to have them come visit us more than once a year, if that.  

Having a good contract with your desktop vendor will save you tons of grief.  In the Dell example above, they were replacing defective motherboards several times a week (we had thousands with the "leaky capacitor" problem).  

In the HP example, since the company was smaller, and our rep had hundreds of other clients also, we pretty much bought refurbs and used their 800 number if we needed tech support.  On the other hand, their support was first class and we had far fewer hardware failures than with Dell.  

You can always buy extended support for high risk items like laptops and leave the rest in "basic business" mode.  Depends on how sharp your IT staff is, and how many bodies you have available to service your hardware.  Sometimes it works out cheaper to have your IT staff do the work, sometimes it's cheaper to have fewer IT people and have the vendor do the grunt work.