At my day job, I buy servers from two vendors, Dell and HP.
Dealing with dell sales is like stabbing yourself in the face over and over, but support is extremely pleasant to deal with, plus I usually don’t have to do anything special to do firmware upgrades. Just download and go.
HP Sales bent over backwards to get my order done right and in time. Yet when it comes to support, they are awful. The website is much more complex to navigate, and assumes you have a windows machine. All the downloads are WIN32 .exes. The kicker is that they just uncompress the real upgrade file(ROMpaq in HP speak) and save it to a location. That’s all it is. I had to call HP support and it took over an hour to explain that no, we don’t use windows and no, I don’t have access to a windows machine. The level 1 support tech had to call back after talking to with a L2 tech. In the end, I was sent a dd-made floppy image. I asked what I should do in the future when there are new updates and was told, “call back in and we’ll make another disk.” That’s not very useful.
I wish there was a vendor out there with HPs sales team and Dells tech support. They’d get all my business in a heartbeat.