At Great Lakes Electronic Distributing, Inc., our policy on quality is that all products and services provided by GLED shall meet or exceed customer requirements. Every GLED employee is committed to continually improving our processes, products, and services to maintain GLED as the Quality Leader in our industry. GLED uses quality components, and we follow stringent quality assurance procedures so that the products our customers receive will operate the way they were intended to.


We take quality seriously at GLED. We continually strive for improvement in all of our products and services, and we can prove it. We track all the systems and components that we sell. Any that are returned and found to require replacement or repair are counted as defects and are included in our defect tracking system. In fact, GLED may be the only IT Products manufacturer who publishes return and defect rates on all of our systems and components. Every GLED customer can view their own quality stats on our website, and compare them to the GLED averages.

If you search the internet, you’ll find that very little information on computer defect rates exists because most system manufacturers do not make their defect rates public. Some online articles do reference research released by the Gartner Group in 2006, which claims that the industry average defect rate on desktop computers in the first year was 5%. It’s important to note that this study uses information gained from a sample of end users, and not actual product data provided by the manufacturer. GLED’s defect rate for ALL systems sold in a one year period (1/1/2009 -12/31/09) is 1.97%.

A laptop reliability report prepared in November 2009 by Square Trade, a leading independent warranty provider, projects that 18.1% of premium laptops, 20.6% of entry level laptops, and 25.1% of netbooks will fail due to malfunction within 3 years. This study examines customer reported failures from a sample of over 30,000 laptops, and includes 9 brands with a minimum sample of 1,000 units each. Again, this information was obtained from a sample of end users and not actual product data provided by the manufacturer. The defect rate for all GLED notebooks sold over a three year period(1/1/2006 - 12/1/2009) is 3.47%.

At GLED, we publish our defect information because we stand behind our quality. A savvy consumer might ask: What are the other manufacturers hiding?