Q1 2010 PC Market Share

Keleko: If business PCs were in fact 90 percent of all PCs sold, Lenovo would probably be number 3 in the US.

I am glad to see competition with Dell and HP. Dell had a run of bad quality with bad caps on their pcs a couple years ago that hurt them. I've been looking at the Dell Studio 580S Model. I find Dell has dumbed down theiir configuration pages to where customization is now very limited. So I'm going to hunt on their outlet page instead.

"Dell had a run of bad quality with bad caps on their pcs a couple years ago that hurt them." That wasn't just Dell. It was an industry-wide problem. That's what led motherboard makers to switch to solid capacitors. The original issue has a story of corporate espionage behind it. The story goes that capacitor manufacturers were working with a new liquid formula for the electrolyte used in capacitors. Some fellow stole an incomplete copy of the formula and sold it to other manufacturers (or was hired by a competitor), but there were contaminants because the formula wasn't complete, which led to all of the overheating problems. The electrolyte solidifies with exposure to air. You would recognize the problem as the capacitor "can" would bulge at the top, then crack, then you would notice crusty stuff build up on the top of them. Those capacitors don't circulate on the market much anymore. Most high-end motherboards use solid caps now too, which are supposedly more reliable and more resistant to exterior heat sources (important for the capacitors that are part of the CPU VRM circuits) but we'll see as time goes on. Most of that happened in around the 2001-2004 timeframe.

HP is still number 1 and make decent desktops and notebooks but for goodness sake stop loading so much crapware\bloatware on these things. The underlying hardware is solid but performance is often drastically reduced by the duplication of software already provided by the OS. Rant over.

@everyone Both Gartner and IDC have stated that the "PC market" IS based on desktop OS machines.... and will not include the iPad. (Sorry can't find a link... but it's buried in their previous press releases) They also said that there will be a new "Media Tablet" market. (Though how the hell they are going to classify and count them beats me!) @Paul "Comparing it to non-existent competition is not exactly useful (or truthful)" See above! Friendly prediction: Paul, you will be spinning this a very different way when all the Android tablets hit the market. And what if Windows Phone 7 Thingy find's it's way onto "big iPod touch-like" devices?

Wae, Thanks for the follow up. To me, Dell got most of the bad rap on the cap issue....almost rhymes LOL