Stone Build Quality..

[pwaddington]

Over the last couple of years i have bought nothing but stone pcs and added the 5 year warranty option. I have found that over the last twelve months or so, quite a lot of pc's are failing due to motherboard, hard drive issues.

As stated, i do have a five year warranty bu these faults are becoming more prevelant.

 

Does anyone out there have any build quality issues with their stone equipment?

[Potato-Peeler]

Yes we have a silly amount. To be fair the 4-5 year old ones are brilliant and don't seem to die, but all of them in the last 2 years or so are awful. We have the stones engineer guy in every week for one reason or another, and he is good, its just the engineer shouldn't have his own tea mug...

[pwaddington]

Totally agree on the point you've made with the engineer. Absolutely terrific guy who know's his stuff, just the fact that hes here so regular proves that theres something wrong.

 

Although the engineer is on-site next day, the pc is still out of action until it is fixed then rebuilt!

[jpenn]

We dont seem to have to many problems. Only reseating the RAM but we do that ourselves. Agreed on the engineer. Dont suppose we are all talking about the same guy called Andy got grey hair down to his shoulders knows what he is talking about and quite tall??

[pwaddington]

Strangly enough, i dont know his name.....

[mb2k01]

I've been almost completely Stone for the last 4 years or so.

Only a handful of minor issues to report (had one issue with buttons on cases which they sorted for us straight away). I did go though a couple of server hard drives (RAID setup and hotswap so fine for me), and again they came out to swap the first, and let me have the second one when I assured them I was fine to do it myself and save them a 100+ mile drive(!) so no real issues with them.

 

I think in the climate we're in at the minute all businesses will be scrambling to keep costs down. If it turned out that perhaps they had re-sourced their build items I wouldn't be suprised - but as long as it's still backed up by their 3 or 5 year next business day warranties I don't mind. For me they're still much better than the major alternatives out there (although, I am keen to try out Simon at CP on my next mini purchase to see what all the fuss on here is about! You all can't be wrong! )

[EvLPhenom]

Most of our older kit has been great but last years PCs where a bit of a pita. We had many issues with graphics cards dieing. i think we had the engineer out to use for about 7 or 8 times within the space of a couple of months, may have been more.

 

Hopefully the newer ones will be much better but this time there is no external graphics card, all on board this year, but still we only had 10.

[Dos_Box]

Most of our older kit has been great but last years PCs where a bit of a pita. We had many issues with graphics cards dieing. i think we had the engineer out to use for about 7 or 8 times within the space of a couple of months, may have been more.

 

Hopefully the newer ones will be much better but this time there is no external graphics card, all on board this year, but still we only had 10.

 

Nvidia by any chance? There is a know problem with NV cards and integrated chipsets failing recently. When it's a hardware failure liek this you can't really blame Stone (IMHO), as many of our older members will remember the Fujitsu and later the IBM hard drive fiasco!

[maniac]

I've been buying stone PCs the lest couple of years, and Not had any real problems. 1 minor issue with a sound card and one monitor has died in an All In One PC that's all.

 

We've got about 80 Stone desktops and a set of 28 of their neo netbooks.

 

Mike.

[cookie_monster]

We've got about 120 Stone desktops bought over the last 4 years and other than a memory issue with a batch (compatibility issue) we've not really had any issues. Most of ours have Intel mobos.

[john]

Nvidia by any chance? There is a know problem with NV cards and integrated chipsets failing recently. When it's a hardware failure liek this you can't really blame Stone (IMHO), as many of our older members will remember the Fujitsu and later the IBM hard drive fiasco!

you don't need to be "that" old to remember the joys of the major batch of Fujitsu HDDs that Stone had a lot of, they swapped them fine in the machines I had at the time, as for IBM, Deathstar is all that needs to be said about them

 

Interesting about the Nvida comment, any sources? I am battling with a supplier over some Nvidia based boards that are just not working well, overheating, locking up, unreliable..... If you have some sources I could throw at them it would be good

[_techie_]

I agreed with the earlier posts...fantastic support, but not as good quality kit as some of the other manufacturers unfortunately from my own experience. The old kit was a bit slow, but seemingly very reliable!

[cookie_monster]

you don't need to be "that" old to remember the joys of the major batch of Fujitsu HDDs that Stone had a lot of, they swapped them fine in the machines I had at the time, as for IBM, Deathstar is all that needs to be said about them

 

I remember the pain when two of my Poweredge 2600 servers came with Fujitsu disks in, fortunatly they had RAID5 as one disk after another slowly failed and were replaced with Seagate disks (fortunatly good Seagate disks). A few days of panic were generated by those disks.

 

 

In general i've found the Intel based Stone kit to be very reliable.

Edited October 15, 2009 by cookie_monster

[Sylv3r]

We have stone kit here and I requested spares of RAM, HD's, PSU's etc which means we can swap out the hardware ourselves and when the Stone engineer comes its a case of swapping the defunct hardware for the new and off he goes.

 

I also keep 2 spare PC's incase of emergency so if a PC in a classroom fails, theres always another PC to swap out meaning that the member of staff is not without a PC for a longer period of time than 10 mins - vital for those schools doing Attendance etc as well as maintaining good Learning & Teaching.