Are Stone Computers rubbish for you as well?

[chazzy2501]

The HP laptops were purchased for Teachers a good year after I'd purchased The Fujitsu Amilo Pros, LSS I still have a couple of Amilios in use today withthe original battery! btw I also bought 4 x ACER Extenza 5620's whos batteries also pooped out after 8 months.

 

Teachers tend to use their laptops plugged in and as such most of my laptops die when the either drop them (tripping over lead) or the PSU socket gets broken through poor use. How often do I see a teacher walking around with a laptop open and the psu dangaling out the back of the thing .

 

 

The Fujitsu C1320s I bought for Pupils (60) with 2 batteries (9hours!) 4 years ago all the main batteries lasted about 3 years, they still work for 2 hours on the second battery alone. (can't justify 60 new batteries for old laptops but also can't afford new laptops!)

[timbo]

Yes you could say we had problems.

bought 90 SFF machines and 19 inch illiyama hard glass monitors, when they were delivered came on the wrong day and delivered by courier on a pallett. the engineer arrived the next day to intall 31 of them, came and told me after unpacking half of them to say there seems to be a problem.

yes there was they wouldn't stand up ,the weight of the machine pulled the monitor over so room had to be installed with machines dumped on the desk the saga continued for nearly 3 months if you want the full horrors e-mail me [email protected]

[tommej]

We bought 5 laptops from them which arrived without an operating system as advertised. We called them up and they sent 5 more, this time with operating systems.

 

Took them 6 months to finally sort out a courier to pick up the other 5.

 

This pretty much turned us off them.

[AIT]

706 stone PC's on site here.

 

Issues are dealt with professionally and quickly and technician can't remember the last time we had a call-out....

 

Perhaps rather than flaming on here you should use your time more wisely and get on the phone to Stone and try and resolve your problems...might be a more mature way of dealing with the issue.

 

Jeff.

 

i agree. 700 pc's they work perfectly!! only about 3 have ever broken. engineers always there next day.

[K.C.Leblanc]

I havn't got time to go through the whole thread, but I will echo I've generaly had good experiences with Stone.

 

The main thing is when you phone thier support people and say it's a problem with the motherboard or the PSU, they will sent an engineer with a motherboard and a PSU.

 

HP will make you wait on the phone half an hour and will expect to just send out a PSU and book another call if the computer ends up needing a motherboard.

[ricki]

HI

 

We have had stone computers for years and they are good and the after sales and service is great.

 

The only problem we have had are on 5 year old thin desktop cases the case fans are going because they are getting warm and fans have to work hard, and with the on button sticking on the normal mini towers but in general they have been great.

 

Richard

[cookie_monster]

Yes you could say we had problems.

bought 90 SFF machines and 19 inch illiyama hard glass monitors, when they were delivered came on the wrong day and delivered by courier on a pallett. the engineer arrived the next day to intall 31 of them, came and told me after unpacking half of them to say there seems to be a problem.

yes there was they wouldn't stand up ,the weight of the machine pulled the monitor over so room had to be installed with machines dumped on the desk the saga continued for nearly 3 months if you want the full horrors e-mail me [email protected]

 

 

 

Another first time poster with 'massive' issues contrary to most of the thread!!!

[gshaw]

We have a lot of Stone kit, last batch of 30 bought in summer 09. Generally they've been very good, noise levels definitely not an issue but we did have some problems with the power buttons on the newer cases getting stuck (bad batch of cases by the looks of it)

 

Personally I miss the BTX design they had in 2007-2008, really liked the platform generally so was a shame it never took off in the mainstream tbh.

 

Warranty is spot on, best service of any manufacturer we deal with... fault reported one day, tech is there the next and fixes the issue... part of the reason we go with Stone (5 year warranty )

 

The last batch of machines bought for admin staff were Lenovo as I felt their USFF design was more solid and also came in a fair bit cheaper... we shall see how that fairs over time.

[Guest colinbell1967]

Hello

I worked for them for a good three years and some of you will know me. The only Scottish chap that ever worked there. I became disheartened with things twelve months ago and have now moved on to pastures new.....Gshaw knows me [email protected].....

Their support was generaly good however pricing was steep....I now deal with XXX & XX directly and have found them to be more than helpful....

[hakko]

Hello

 

Well after nearly a year of ordering **** we've had no problems apart from an antivirus that wouldn't uninstall on a batch of 10 laptops last week. Thankfully the products have an express code at the bottom, so we go through to a call centre in the UK. The dude emailed me a command line argument as I was on the phone and presto all 10 sorted.

 

We've also ditched HP for printers, as when we've ordered new HP printers they develop problems very quickly, within months and 3 years warranty is extra! I remember one HP support incident - Phone Indian tech support, to then get an email from the US, to get picked up by a UK courier and have it taken to France for repair/replacement.

[david_1152]

Any of you guys still dealing with stone? I could use some accurate and up to date pricing from them, without having to talk to them (for one reason or another) If any of you have recently had a quote for any equipment particularly their new N109 laptop / tablet could you send me the spec and prices please?

 

Cheers all.

[bandgeekmafia78]

Stone are, in a word, rubbish. We took out a 5 year on-site warranty with them 4 years ago. All of a sudden the computers are dying one by one and although they are still covered by warranty, they don't have the parts in stock. This means we can sometimes we waiting a month to change a motherboard/hard drive etc.

[mb2k01]

I'm still using them yes.

I think my previous posts on here are probably fairly positive and praise filled, and still represent my current thoughts/feelings.

Still baffled by the very negative responses by some here - so, so different to my experience over 5 or 6 years of using them!

[Dos_Box]

Stone are, in a word, rubbish. We took out a 5 year on-site warranty with them 4 years ago. All of a sudden the computers are dying one by one and although they are still covered by warranty, they don't have the parts in stock. This means we can sometimes we waiting a month to change a motherboard/hard drive etc.

 

To be fair, that's not just Stone. Any major manufacturer will begin to lose specific model parts after about 3 years as it's just too inneficiant and costly to keep them for any longer. There are plenty of instances on here where people have returned laptops etc only to recive a 'free' upgrade due to a lack of model spares. TBH, I wouldn't get a maintenance package for more than 3 years for these reasons alone.

[alan-d]

We've been using Stone since 2005 (ish) and all our 250 PCs are now from them. We also have laptops and recently 4 ESXi host servers.

The odd occassion we have had bad units on delivery but this was always sorted out without quibble the next day.

 

Occassionally we buy units from elsewhere and although the quality may be on par or better than Stone the support was nowhere near as good.

[hakko]

I'd be worried about any organisation that uses Stone PCs. I've been around the public sector and there are staff that see a broken PC as a "day off".

 

I don't care if your "support is great", you send someone out next day etc. etc. I'd rather NOT have to use your support because your PCs never break down.

 

I have raised my issues with Stone. We even had "big cheese" come down to see us Stone, you are the weakest link, goodbye!

[Gibson335]

I'd be worried about any organisation that uses Stone PCs. I've been around the public sector and there are staff that see a broken PC as a "day off".

 

I don't care if your "support is great", you send someone out next day etc. etc. I'd rather NOT have to use your support because your PCs never break down.

 

I have raised my issues with Stone. We even had "big cheese" come down to see us Stone, you are the weakest link, goodbye!

 

I'm amazed by this. We've been using Stone for several years now, and seldom have any problems with the hardware itself. Pre and post-sales service and support has been first class. Given that we generally replace between 80 and 100 each year, and have seen very few failures, I guess it's a matter of take them as you find them - in our case, I'd take them. As for the warranty mentioned above, as per the reply to that it's not unusual to find this with fifth year of a warranty because few places are in a position to hold stock in that way - and Stone's recycling has helped them with this anyway.

[localzuk]

My biggest issue when I've spoken to Stone was simply price. They have been about 20% more expensive than Viglen for every quote I had asked for.

[maniac]

My biggest issue when I've spoken to Stone was simply price. They have been about 20% more expensive than Viglen for every quote I had asked for.

 

See for me that's worked the other way round, with the exception of a bunch of L60 laptops which we had of Viglen 2 years ago which was a big mistake seeing as Viglen are unable to supply replacement screens for them on their own, and want to charge £170 for a new laptop chassis everytime we need to replace a screen. After a lot of ringing around I sourced the replacement screen from another supplier, but I shouldn't have to do that so that annoys me about Viglen.

 

@hakko - I'm still surprised by this, as I've still never had major issues with Stone. The worst it got was with their recent NT200 laptop and its strange over heating problem, but this has now been resolved to my satisfaction. You will never get PCs that 'don't break down' that's an impossibility and seeing as Stone build their machines from relatively generic componants there's as greater chance of a Stone PC breaking down as any other brand.

 

@bandgeekmafia78 - Are your machines the Older all-in-one machines with 17" screens? And are the problems to do with the logic boards failing in the monitors? If so, then there's a really good reason they can't get the spares, and that's because a rather large foreign componant manufacturer who produced the fairly custom screens for that model went under a while back so they cannot souce new parts for them any more. I don't really blame Stone for that, it wasn't a small manufacturer and a lot of PC producers got caught out in the same way.

 

Mike.

[localzuk]

See for me that's worked the other way round, with the exception of a bunch of L60 laptops which we had of Viglen 2 years ago which was a big mistake seeing as Viglen are unable to supply replacement screens for them on their own, and want to charge £170 for a new laptop chassis everytime we need to replace a screen. After a lot of ringing around I sourced the replacement screen from another supplier, but I shouldn't have to do that so that annoys me about Viglen.

 

That is normal practice with computer manufacturers. Go to HP and see if you can get just the LCD panel, they'll say no and you have to buy the top part of the laptop as a whole unit. Price sounds about right too.

[edumoto]

That is normal practice with computer manufacturers. Go to HP and see if you can get just the LCD panel, they'll say no and you have to buy the top part of the laptop as a whole unit. Price sounds about right too.

 

On the understanding that a broken screen won't be picked up by the warranty, the manufacturer is the last place I'd go for a new screen for all the reasons above. Sooooo many people offering replacement panels now there's really no need and I've never had one yet that didn't come out of the housings etc for just a screen swap. bit off topic though so I'll leave that there

[antichrest]

See for me that's worked the other way round, with the exception of a bunch of L60 laptops which we had of Viglen 2 years ago which was a big mistake seeing as Viglen are unable to supply replacement screens for them on their own, and want to charge £170 for a new laptop chassis everytime we need to replace a screen. After a lot of ringing around I sourced the replacement screen from another supplier, but I shouldn't have to do that so that annoys me about Viglen.

 

@hakko - I'm still surprised by this, as I've still never had major issues with Stone. The worst it got was with their recent NT200 laptop and its strange over heating problem, but this has now been resolved to my satisfaction. You will never get PCs that 'don't break down' that's an impossibility and seeing as Stone build their machines from relatively generic componants there's as greater chance of a Stone PC breaking down as any other brand.

 

@bandgeekmafia78 - Are your machines the Older all-in-one machines with 17" screens? And are the problems to do with the logic boards failing in the monitors? If so, then there's a really good reason they can't get the spares, and that's because a rather large foreign componant manufacturer who produced the fairly custom screens for that model went under a while back so they cannot souce new parts for them any more. I don't really blame Stone for that, it wasn't a small manufacturer and a lot of PC producers got caught out in the same way.

 

Mike.

 

Been perfect as well other than nt200 like above, they said resolved but testing if worked, have they got back to you?

[maniac]

On the understanding that a broken screen won't be picked up by the warranty, the manufacturer is the last place I'd go for a new screen for all the reasons above. Sooooo many people offering replacement panels now there's really no need and I've never had one yet that didn't come out of the housings etc for just a screen swap. bit off topic though so I'll leave that there

 

I can get official Dell replacements for their D520/530 range of machines for the same as I can source them from elsewhere, I can get replacement screens for my Toshiba netbooks from Toshiba if I so desire as well. Admitedly I rarely buy from the manufacturer, but still it's nice to have the choice and not have to buy un-necessary bits just to change the screen.

 

@antichrest - I believe they have finished testing it now, they sent me a replacement machine which I've been assured shouldn't suffer from the same issues as the previous one, 3 days in and it seems ok.

Edited February 9, 2011 by maniac

[edumoto]

I can get official Dell replacements for their D520/530 range of machines for the same as I can source them from elsewhere, I can get replacement screens for my Toshiba netbooks from Toshiba if I so desire as well...

 

out of interest maniac, can you remember roughly what you paid for the Tosh stuff direct from Tosh? whenever I've tried them directly they have wanted £150-£250 + Vat for standard 15" screens. I've not had to do netbook stuff yet (touch wood), but the third party 15"/15.4" are generally between £60 and £90. (£90 tends to be for the dell speific models that have the inverters hard wired.

[maniac]

out of interest maniac, can you remember roughly what you paid for the Tosh stuff direct from Tosh? whenever I've tried them directly they have wanted £150-£250 + Vat for standard 15" screens. I've not had to do netbook stuff yet (touch wood), but the third party 15"/15.4" are generally between £60 and £90. (£90 tends to be for the dell speific models that have the inverters hard wired.

 

I can't remember, it's only 1 trolley of netbooks we have from Toshiba and I've only had to replace 1 screen so far. It was under £100, but I think we did find it cheaper from elsewhere in the end anyway.