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Our Customers

Manufacturers of personal computers face competitive challenges on two broad fronts: fierce price competition that limits the top line, and customer support and service costs that can erode the bottom line.

Price competition is an uncontrollable and unrelenting reality that sharply depresses revenue per unit. Consider that in 2002 only 20 percent of all Personal Computers (PCs) sold for less than $1,000; in 2005, more than 50 percent sold below the $1,000 mark. Meanwhile, the number of higher-margin PCs that sell for more than $1,500 is rapidly declining from nearly 30 percent in 2002 to fewer than 10 percent in 2005.

Unfortunately, service and support costs have not kept pace with declining prices. Despite off-shore help desk organizations and streamlined repair processes, service and support costs run from 1.5 to 3 percent of revenue for many major PC corporations, as reflected in their published warranty accruals.

The effect of these opposing forces on margins and profitability is dramatic. Net earnings of less than two percent are not uncommon among PC manufacturers and their PC divisions.

For more than a dozen years, PC-Doctor, Inc. has worked with major PC manufacturers to reduce avoidable service and support costs, especially the unnecessary expenses associated with Out Of Box Failures (OOBFs) and No Trouble Found (NTF) returns. NTF return costs are unnecessary because accurate, current, and consistent diagnostic tests and diagnostic processes can help distinguish between hardware failures that require expensive repairs or returns and software or other issues that can often be resolved without incurring return or repair expenses.

The Company

PC-Doctor, Inc., a privately held corporation headquartered in Reno, Nevada, is the leading global provider of diagnostic and system information solutions to the personal-computing industry. The company's products are acknowledged by PC industry leaders as the de facto standard for diagnostic solutions used by manufacturers, support organizations, repair facilities, and end users to reduce costs, improve quality, and increase customer satisfaction.

Since its founding in 1993 in Emeryville, California, PC-Doctor has accumulated a vast library of intellectual property, including multiple patents that the company deploys in products and services across the PC life-cycle. Today, more than three-quarters of the company's 80-plus people are employed in software development, quality assurance, and customer-facing roles, underscoring the PC-Doctor commitment to innovation, quality, and customer satisfaction. One of the company's major initiatives is the Certified Hardware Vendor (CHV™) program that seeks to standardize diagnostics used across the industry and encourages manufacturers to add their own tests to PC-Doctor products.

Company Profile PDF Sheet

The Product Families

PC-Doctor's product families are relied upon by leading manufacturers of PCs and PC-based products, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and Acer, as well as major service providers such as Staples and Flextronics. Key to the company's success is a uniform nucleus of diagnostic tests and system information tools — called the Modular Core Technology (MCT™) — that delivers diagnostic consistency and continuity across the design, manufacturing, support, and service phases of the PC life-cycle. PC-Doctor diagnostics are delivered in these product families:

• OEM: Pre-installed on system hard drives and other storage devices to give end users and technicians access to accurate diagnostics and system tools to validate that hardware is operating properly and to troubleshoot hardware issues. PC-Doctor bundled products are available for Windows and Linux.
• Intelligent Messaging Services (IMS): PC-Doctor IMS Solutions deliver highly contextual support and marketing messages that improve and enhance the PC user experience, reduce support costs and drive aftermarket revenue. In addition to the client application, cloud infrastructure and integration services, PC-Doctor offers operational services to create, publish and manage messages globally.
• Factories & Hi-Volume Repair: Used by manufacturers to reduce out-of-box failures and validate systems before shipment to customers. They also are used widely by repair depots to troubleshoot systems returned under warranty and to refurbish used systems before resale. PC-Doctor factory products are available for Windows, Linux and DOS.
• PC Service Professionals: Used by technical service organizations to troubleshoot hardware quickly and accurately as part of the repair process, to verify correct operation after repair, and to validate that hardware upgrades are operating properly.