HP sucks!!

Post by **nikos** » 2010 Jan 22, 09:35

i bought a new HP laptop the other day. Good on paper, but their support is totally rubbish!! It was the first time I bought something not from Dell (they have very good support btw) since they don't really focus on greece, so I ended up with this HP pile of faeces

I need to vent my anger... :evil: :x :!:

I have a simple problem that the windows backup doesn't work. At all. It must be some of their $#!+e installed for 'system checkup'. So I've been trying to contact their support (greece) for about a month now (!) without any luck

their online chat, doesn't work (some failure of installation)

you try to use their email support and they reply to you to call them on the phone (yeah, in greece they are afraid of emails in general, i don't know why :shock: )

so they give me a telephone number. It doesn't work. I write to them again. They give me another number. It doesn't work either. I write to them again. They offer to call me. I give them my number. I wait for a week. Nobody's calling. I write to them again, asking for a normal phone number. They give me a normal looking number, which I called today, only to hear an automated message that says I should call another number (one of those that I know don't work :shock: )

so, yeah, i'm seriously pissed off with HP, and i'm never buying again from them, and i urge you to do the same, as their support is dreadful. Actually it's non-existent

well done HP! :roll:

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2010 Jan 22, 20:01

Nice rant.

You asked an OEM for OS help? Really? I didn't know people did that.

"Real Men" don't use laptops anyway. There's a lot to be said for home build; you know your machine inside and out and never ask anyone for help.

(Paul Simon wrote a song about that, once.)

Are you playing with Images? Third party software is usually best for backups... the Win7 Image Backup usually works fine, though it is painfully slow compared to "others", and it likes to have a proper Windows disc to play with, which, of course, they didn't give you. (Should still have the capacity to make a rescue disc though.) And if it's Win7 Business or Ultimate, they screwed with the active boot partition, so mind that - it doesn't always work as expected, upon reinstall.

Tuxman · Post by **Tuxman** » 2010 Jan 22, 20:34

Hmm, good old Dell. I own a Dell laptop, too. HP might be fine for printers, but I would never trust their computers.

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2010 Jan 22, 22:12

As members of my old alma mater go, Michael Dell would be considered slightly more successful than myself, but I still wouldn't buy a computer off a swindler.

Tuxman · Post by **Tuxman** » 2010 Jan 22, 22:16

This does not make his products worse.

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2010 Jan 22, 22:35

In this case, a stain on the character of a man is a stain upon his worldly works.

And yes, old fashioned moralising though it be, I hold fast to it's intended ethic of integrity.

Tuxman · Post by **Tuxman** » 2010 Jan 22, 22:37

So could you tell me one reason to prefer another product? Just because Michael Dell has weird ethics?

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2010 Jan 22, 23:06

Integrity is a rare thing in this world, so I would place it as it's own value above and beyond any value of a machine. (Not joking about that.)

My stated preference earlier was to always home build - any machine of any spec (including laptops) can be made cheaper and usually better by the more adventurous consumer willing to wear an anti-static wristband for an hour or two. If more people knew what was inside their whirring box, they'd be less afraid of it.

As you generally need to use a separate installation of Windows anyway (to be absolutely free from the OEM crap-ware), it's worth the trouble.

But, as usual, "convenience" has gotten the better of people in this superficially busy age of illusion.

I should allow him a few extra points for his Ubuntu drive of last season - though it too, I fear, was just a cynical ploy for sales.

So, as impractical as it sounds, my answer is: Integrity. (Probably doesn't mean much to a younger generation who think the world is here as a convenience for their whims. Are you one of them?

)

Tuxman · Post by **Tuxman** » 2010 Jan 22, 23:16

I don't know any billion US-$ company with enough integrity, so I chose my laptop by its quality. And Dell has quality indeed.

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2010 Jan 22, 23:23

I may not like them myself, but Apple is known (to a design degree at least) for their quality. And now you no longer need be tied to their rather goofy OS, it's all the more practical.

As hardware quality goes, Dell are just beginning to imitate the VAIO's screen technology, but they aren't there just yet. Obviously a bit cheaper, though.

Tuxman · Post by **Tuxman** » 2010 Jan 22, 23:27

Kilmatead wrote:Apple is known (to a design degree at least) for their quality.

Not to me. I only know the stories about broken displays.

Post by **nikos** » 2010 Jan 23, 08:49

"principles are for those that can afford them" my granma used to say

and you can't enforce such principles anyway, if you want to stick to 'clean' people you would have to pretty much avoid everybody who's managed to succeed in the cut throat world of business!

anyway, back to HP, i sent them an email with a lot of 'french' expressions and lo and behold, they ... called me!

their recommendation? to reformat the hard disk and bring it to its original state, undoing all the painful work i've been doing for the last month :shock:

so i guess i'll be using xplorer2 for the weekly backup as usual.
may their stock price crash and burn like greece

Tuxman · Post by **Tuxman** » 2010 Jan 23, 12:14

nikos wrote:burn like greece

LOL!

narayan · Post by **narayan** » 2010 Jan 24, 02:50

Speaking of integrity, both HP and DELL had a common problem with nVidia GPU cips in their laptops that overheated (last year). Result: Failure to start or blank screen (and much later, a burnt motherboard).

But both companies sent a patch to their customers that kept the notebook's fan continuously ON.

And here comes the cheating part: Despite the added cooling (which drained the battery fast), the chips fried the motherboard on the long term. And then the customers went back to the manufacturer, who said they cannot replace it because it is out of warranty!

Apple also had the same issue, but they recalled their notebooks.

http://windowssecrets.com/2009/04/09/01 ... vidia-chip

So Nikos' Granny was correct!

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2010 Jan 24, 09:03

narayan wrote:Apple also had the same issue, but they recalled their notebooks.

If memory serves, Apple had a slightly more troublesome problem with a larger-than-average proportion of faults leading to actual meltdown:

...in turn leading to a consumer issue of public safety (more related to the batteries used than faulty chips). Companies tend to respond better when directly blamed for public safety rather than "I'm sorry sir, did you buy our overpriced extended warranty? No? How unfortunate for you."

To be fair, many people don't fully understand how TDP specifications relate to performance - as consumers demand more and more powerful hardware (in the case of laptops, jammed into an ill-designed space), there's going to be long term complications.

On the technical side of things, when a single (64nm) graphics card is can be designed to contain upwards of 700 million transistors (significantly more on modern hardware, up to 3 billion), one could be forgiven for anticipating a slight Euclidean breakdown into chaos theory from time to time.

Caveat emptor, physics is not your friend.

On the lighter side, combine a broken laptop and a dysfunctional human family, and you can end up with The Worst Christmas Ever. (The video's a little dark at times, but you'll never regret spending Christmas alone again.

)