We had standardised on Maxdata over the last few years and I found the kit very reliable and the after sales support excellent.

Belinea were good value, my first 17" monitor was a Belinea and the quality/price ratio was brilliant (its still lying around somewhere and works fine). Sad to see a company that combined value and quality go titsup.

I liked Belinea sold a few too. Its sad when the good guys go to the wall.

I work for a company that sold Maxdata computers in the UK and all I can say is "about bloody time"

The quality of the machines was terrible. Simple faults due to bad build quality were common. We had a number of machine which were incorrectly syspreped.

"We had a number of machine which were incorrectly syspreped"

I'm guessing that your not exactly experianced in the IT world then...

Buy 10 manchines from each of the top 10 manufactures and tell me the % that actually turned up on time were

a) What you ordered

b) Turned on and worked out of the box

I don't know where you buy your gear, but I buy Dell and I got everything right everytime... Maybe you should check your ordering process??

Last time I bought from Dell (10 PCs for our training room) they were delivered without keyboards. 24 hours later the keyboards arrived but were the wrong ones (PS2s not USBs). 2 days later another batch of keyboards arrived this time they were the heavy "clack key" types instead of the slim boards we'd ordered. Finally a week after we had taken delivery we finally got the keyboards we ordered...

...we switched on the PCs and found them loaded with Windows NT instead of Windows 2000.

Still using a Maxdata. Cheap, quiet, stable. Perhaps they didn't need to be replaced often enough.

Shame really as the kit was decent quality. Used to work there back around 99-2000 and saw which way hardware margins were going. It's not enough these days to flog tin without a unique offering unless you're one of the big boys. Would you buy a rebadged intel server from them when you could get an HP/DELL for less money? Feel sorry for the remaining staff, good people.

..oh and paris because even she could see this coming.