The biggest merger in high-tech history may be a financial success for Hewlett-Packard Co. and the former Compaq Computer Corp., but it hasn't made buyers of their computers any happier. Both brands picked up terrible grades in an annual PC user satisfaction survey released Thursday. Dell Computer Corp., on the other hand, continued to shine. And overall, the 18,000 subscribers surveyed by PC Magazine were happier this year than in 2002 about the reliability of their computers and the available technical support. Much of the credit for that improvement goes to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP operating system, which was released in October 2001, the survey found. Earlier incarnations of Windows were more likely to crash or freeze.
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