My sisters had a Fujitsu Siemens laptop for over a year and its been really good. So good i recommend a similar model for my brother for when he starts uni. It'll be sad to see them go.

Bought a cheap P4 based FSC system a couple of years back as a basic home PC to allow me to surf, bank, read El reg and get down to som work on my MCSE (If the hardware wasn't capable of playing games then I wouldn't get distracted despite the best efforts of a mate at work who spends practically all of his spare time on MMORPGs)

Spent £410 plus extended warranty on it (as did want to have to spend on parts if anything did go wrong) from comet, was ok for first couple of months and then the trouble started.

I'd had a Packard Bell before which had a Fujitsu drive which was the only component I had no problems whatsoever with so thought that FSC should be ok.

It was a Scaleo P (more like Scally O)

Hard disk powering up and down during read/write requests which meant that Windows ground to a halt as obviously it couldn't read/write to/from the swapfile.

had the side/top off and did the usual, checked for loose power/ribbon cables, all fine, reformatted (seemed ok when the disk was under sustained load during the Windows install)

Ensured all power management, acoustic settings were off, problem recurred.

Phoned FSC who arranged for an engineer to come with replacement drive, he turned up with a Seagate drive (replacement for a WD drive), connected it, booted and immediately got a SMART failure imminent message, looked at me as if he'd not seen one before and said "'spose its cos there is no operating system on it"

I said "no its because the drive is about to die" he gets on phone to FSC's engineer support and relays to them the news, they instruct him to reseat the CPU, memory etc., boots again and same message, they agree to send out a second drive.

One week later and he's back again with same model of drive, plugs in, same error, talks to FSC who ask to speak to me.

They tell me they want to take the system in to have a look at it, I ask them whether they cant just replace the motherboard to rule out a controller fault 'cant do that is their reponse.

Courier comes to collect PC and a week goes by, gets a call on my mobile at work from an engineer at FSC who tells me he's had it under test for 48 hours and cant find a problem but for slight dent on the DVD drive bezel (which must have happened in transit) and that he will replace the drive.

Get PC bavck and start using it in anger again after Christmas, problem recurred, rang FSC who stuck to their story that a senior engineer had looked and cant find a problem and refuse to do any further work on it.

I end up giving it to a colleague who replaces the PSU and drive and gets shot of it PDQ, its probably on a scrapheap now.

ended up writing off 600 quid in total because theivin' comet wouldn't give back the insurance premium on it.

Fushitsu Siemens Kaput Computers - Crap products, crap service, here's hoping one or more directors lose shedloads.

It's your electricity, buy a UPS next time.

The missus has a Scaleo of some description (AMD64 as opposed to P4) at home and I have to say it is bulletproof hardware-wise. Can always be the case that you got a 'duff' box, as has happened to me with a couple of Macs over the years with shonky construction...

You bought it from comet AND paid £410 - i laugh at you - why not just use PC world next time...

go and look on the internet for a good computer shop next time - morons and there money etc.

Paris - cos even she is not that stupid.

pctechxp do you really think that the merger should end because you has a fault PC. Every manufacturer has bad experiences and to be honest you are a bit to blame, if you had a real fault you could have returned the item to Comet under the sale of goods act with or without the extended warranty. Your contract was with them and all you had to do was document and perhaps video the errors.

If every manufacturer was to shut down just because of one story like yours they would all shut down.

Those FS machines have won loads of awards and have been pretty reliable (they have won reader awards in PC Pro).

If the JV is to be renewed maybe they need to look at moving manufacture to the far east and just have the design team in Europe.

I have an FSC Cordant bought in 2003 from PC World, the only issue I've had with it was a DVD drive failure, rectified quickly by what was then PC ServiceCall (in fact they mixed up my machine and ordered me the wrong drive - I now have 2 DVDRW drives in the machine!)

I would quite happily buy another one, either desktop or notebook if I needed another machine.

I've had a Scaleo T for quite a while now, and, as a previous comment said, it seems to be bulletproof. Plugged all sorts of stuff into it without any problems. Loaded up all the drive bays with 1Tb disks. Vista worked without problems (it was originally an XP machine). Only thing I've really had to do is hoover it every 6 months to keep the fan quiet!