I bought a nice, top of the line laptop from Dell two years ago. In the first year, my hard drive, modem, and one stick of 512 MB RAM had to be replaced. Thankfully, it was under warranty. Stupid me…I only bought one year of warranty service.

Dell was very good at providing warranty replacement parts. I didn’t get on-site service because, well, I’m here and can do that sort of thing. Today I am at the cottage and went to dial in to get my email (no high speed here). Well, lo and behold, my modem didn’t work. Totally amazing.

No, it’s not an excuse for getting my story in late. I should have had it in before the weekend.

Technology should work. Plain and simple. I get really annoyed when it doesn’t. Really, really, really annoyed–and I am being polite, for the sake of you, dear reader.

Dell was good in its word to provide warranty service, but I would have preferred a better quality product. Next time I buy a computer I am going to research all the components that the manufacturer uses. Each manufacturer needs to have a good track record for quality products.

I bought the Dell laptop based on the features it contained. That’s like buying a Cadillac. I owned a Cadi once, and never again. After a certain age it required more in maintenance costs than I would have been charged for the payments on a new car. I got rid of it and gained a bit of financial stability in the process.

In a lot of ways I admire Dell. Their computers are easy to get drivers for, the BIOS updates are simple to install, and they have some innovative case designs that are easy to access. Some disagree with me on this, but I’d rather open a case without tools, pull out cables using pull tabs rather than the wire, and extract optical and hard drives using those green thingamajobs (clips). If you’ve opened one of their cases, you know what I’m talking about.

Dell’s BIOS settings are rather simple to configure, but lack much of the functionality found on other chipsets. This is good from a technician’s point of view, because it means that a novice user who knows how to get into the BIOS will likely only make easy-to-fix changes.

Some AMD based chipsets come with many more features than Intel, which is why I prefer Intel because fewer things can go wrong.

So, quality is, or should be, job number one for any manufacturer of technology (or anything, for that matter). Sure, price goes up with good quality, but the cost of maintenance goes up even more with poor quality.

Consider the cost of not being able to download and upload emails while at the cottage. I was expecting to be able to do so, and made plans for the weekend that included packing a phone line. Now I will have to go into town, about half an hour away, to get a high speed connection. That cost includes my time, gas, and wear and tear on the car. There’s even the obvious cost to the environment. I’ll also have to buy a PC card modem at some point.

Perhaps God is keeping me off the Internet (see my previous articles).

So, there you have it, the cost of poor quality is more expensive than the cost of good workmanship.

Ah, now there’s a word–workmanship. I haven’t heard that noun for a long time. It is usually preceded by “pride in”. Where some companies can take pride in the service they offer, I would prefer to have quality products that didn’t need to be serviced in the first place.

There are some companies that seem to take pride in what they do. I take pride in my work, and when something comes back to me that reflects on poor workmanship that was my fault, I am hurt and annoyed at myself.

My best customers are the ones I don’t see that often. They make sure their computers are scanned for viruses, adware, spyware, and any other evilware around. They defragment their hard drives, update definitions, do backups, and take an interest in their machine.

I make sure my car gets an oil change every 5,000 kms, and buy the best oil for it. My kids get an education that is based on quality rather than quantity.

Good customers also buy good machines, ones based on quality of workmanship over quality of advertisements.

But there is always the siren song of features. Many cars and computers have lots of possible upgrades. The awesome $2,500 gaming machine as advertised is even more awesome with more RAM, faster processors, and dual hard disks, driving the price to $5,000 and above.

Without considering the quality of the upgrades, the consumer (me in this case) looks at all the neato features he (more often he than she) can sink their teeth into. Oops, forgot to notice that the modem is made by a no-name manufacturer from the mountain region of some unknown country.

What is the solution? First, do your research. Find out what products the manufacturer of the computer you want to buy uses as components. For example–and I love to bring this up again because I was looking forward to a day without being in the car–is your modem manufacturer US Robotics or Robotwerp?

Next, look at the track record of the computer manufacturer. What is the industry saying about the quality of their products, the service they offer, and overall customer satisfaction?

But don’t stop there. You still need to consider the quality of the products even the companies with the best record are using for your new machine. They may have switched suppliers for their modems, for an example that belabours the point. Check also the manufacturer of the hard drive, mother board, memory, keyboard, battery, and the screen. You can check for the power supply manufacturer, but they rarely cause a problem.

Finally, read what they say about the pride they put into their work. If their literature lists features as benefits, rather than quality as a benefit, steer away. Do they send the equipment in a nice package, loaded with quality software, or are you getting brown boxes and free trial applications?

I know, benefits and low cost are still something to consider, but if you are considering the features more than the quality, I suggest you purchase some extra parts. A PC Card or USB modem, for example.