Do any of the big hardware suppliers have UK based support centres or at
least Europe based? We've had four Dell Inspiron 5150 laptops fail within a
week of each other and discover that this is a common problem with the 5150
which, to be honest, appears to be a poor design with heating and
motherboard failures galore.

I'm okay with this, not happy, but okay. We're big boys - we decided not to
take out the warranty on the basis that experience has shown us that if a
laptop gets through it's first year, it usually carries on until it becomes
obsolete. So it's more cost effective for us to simply replace a laptop if
it fails and would cost too much to repair. We made that decision so we have
to live with it.

But it has left a nasty taste so we're considering switching supplier for
desktop and laptops (Dell servers are still okay) and one key benefit would
be a more local support option. If I get one more message from Dell support
from the other side of the world from somebody who's first language is not
English I'll scream. I'm not being racist - it just doesn't work!

So do any other the other big manufacturers like HP or IBM have UK support
centres?

Cheers, Rob.