During our visits to manufacturing plants, we tried to find out how vendors support today's PCs in the face of lower profit margins. Each company focuses a lot of energy on cutting costs, largely by trying to reduce the volume of calls it gets. That effort starts even before the system leaves the factory. Companies strive to make their setup instructions clearer. For example, HP recently eliminated all words from its instructions, using just colorful pictures to illustrate the hook-up process.
Many companies preload drivers for the most popular printers, scanners, and other peripherals.
And when customers report software bugs or incompatibilities, manufacturers will ask the software makers to fix the problem for future computers. If a fix can't be made, companies may stop offering the bundle. But the biggest push now is to get customers off the phone and onto the Web. Of course, PC makers stressed that they won't be cutting off their phone lines. The Web is good, but if your computer is down, then it's not an option.