Not A Graceful Recovery For HP Customers 434
An alert reader named michael pointed out this article running at Infoworld on the policy instated by HP of supplying actual Windows XP backup media for their Pavilion only if owners really, really need them. While HP and other vendors have been moving to recovery partitions for a little while, it seems like HP customers have to jump through particular hoops to demonstrate they really need physical media, and aren't very happy about it. The article makes a good point too regarding the installation of Linux partitions. The banner ad on the page is for --guess what? -- Windows XP.
Why not CD's (Score:3, Interesting)
HP Bites (Score:4, Interesting)
We took it to Best Buy and spent two months going back and forth with them over the problems. They'd send it out for repair and it would come back broken.
In January the decided to just give him another machine. They settled on a HP...can't remember the model...off the shelf.
I set it up for him, and booted it. And it hung. Tried everything I could think of. No good. I called tech support, and was told to restore the thing from the partition. No good.
Next day, I went with him to the store to get it fixed. The desk techs tried to boot it, restore it, etc. No good.
After an hour or two of futzing with it, they grabbed another one for him.
Wiser now, he asked them to check it to be sure it ran.
It didn't.
Hours later, they had pulled the entire stock (4 of that model, + the one we had returned) and tried to run them. Nothing. Defective shipment? Who knows.
They gave him a similar Compaq and sent us on our merry way.
views from an Ex-HP support technician (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolute bullshit - i worked on the HP Pavilion support line (thru an outsourcer - www.stream.com) for 3 years - the majority of calls were due to crappy inferior integrated hardware(onboard sound/shared video memory), dodgy OEM drivers, and general windows flakiness due to sub-standard componenets.
For example, the 88xx series had major DVD playback issues - software decoder was a HP customised OEM'd piece of shit.
Researching this issue, i got a 'warezed' copy of the decoder that was sold directly via the vendors web site - no problems...
And the 31xx series (3 years ago)had a WD hard drive that was "guaranteed" to fail after 8 months of use. And would WD take them back? Would they fuck.... we had to let them fail, then replace them. Of course when the new hdd failed, you were SOL as they were outta warranty.
And for the rumor that returned Pavilions were cannibalized for new and/or repaired Pavilions.....
Long overdue (Score:3, Interesting)
The first thing I did with my new computer, fortunately, was try out my new CD burner and burn the folder they had on there with all the Packard Bell drivers on it. I reformatted my machine (I hate default installs), then installed with an original Win98 CD. The drivers weren't there! So, I pulled out my trusty CDR which I'd just burned and found the drivers in there after some searching.
To make a long story short, not providing the original CDs is hardly a solution for most customers. Many questions are left unanswered:
- What if the hard disk crashes?
- What if I decide to install another OS on my machine and then want to put back the OS which came with my system?
- What if my partition table gets corrupted?
- What if I want to configure the hard disk into a RAID?
- If Windows really comes bundled with the computer, why don't I get the original retail CDs? Almost gives an illegal or unjust feel to the whole deal.
Anyway, '98 is long gone on that computer and I'm happily running Linux on it today. I'll never buy from Packard Bell again (for the CD issue, and for the absolutely poor tech support), and the chance of my buying from HP is pretty slim as well, at least till they get this mess straightened out.
Actually, I'm more of a Dell fan, but they've been getting under my skin, too. When configuring the options for your new computer (online store), you don't get to pick "I DO NOT want Windows or MS Office/Works bundled with this computer" as an option. I am forced to pay for something I probably won't use. This practice has got to stop. Hopefully the DOJ can give us a hand on that one.
HCF (Score:3, Interesting)
How about the EULA (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sick of HP's crap. (Score:2, Interesting)
I borrowed my parent's digital camera last week to take a few pictures, I didn't have the driver CD and I'm using windows xp, so required drivers aren't on that cd anyway. I go to HP's site and it proceeds to give me instructions on ordering a CD from them for replacement drivers. As near as I can figure, digital camera drivers are analogous to scanner drivers and should be about 2 megs at most, TWAIN crap and all. As long as I have photoshop I have no need for whatever crap they shovel onto the CD. I would have been a happy camper if I could have just taken the 30 seconds to download the drivers. Instead I am supposed to jump through hoops and shell out for a CD for software for a piece of hardware I already own.
Earlier in the week, I was at work, dealing with one of their combination printer/fax/copier machines, the laserjet 3100. I couldn't find the driver cd initially, and didn't care to try to install standard postscript drivers since they usually don't work on lower end printers anyway. I try to download the drivers off of their website, once again, I'm instructed to order a CD. For something as simple as printer drivers. 30 seconds of my time turned into 30 minutes as I had to hunt down the driver CD in the woman's office and get the drivers installed.
As a result I sent a nastygram to HP asking why drivers for some of their more obscure products (anything not supported by built in windows drivers anyway) aren't available on their site. The response I got basically amounted to "you need to order a CD because we don't have the drivers up, so you need to order a CD and you can find the instructions for ordering a CD on our site."
Last week we also had a 2 month old laserjet 4100N fail with a "fuser error", a 1200 die with a "printer tray mispick" error, the 8100s seem to have a massive issue where the third tray jams constantly. and our 8500C(or 8550, forget which) was slower than all hell. HPs tech support gave us a song and dance about how the engine speed only related to multiple copies of the same page... blah blah blah. They finally got a marketroid in there to say that it wasn't right, he called tech support and we spent half a day working on this crap, only to use older drivers that let it work at a reasonable speed.
Last week I had to set up another printer in another department, using one of their external JetDirect print servers. Apparently the things do not like it if you dont have a DHCP server. When setting them up manually, for some stupid reason they will only take one change to their network settings at a time. Change ip address, ok, go back in, change subnet mask, ok, go back in, change gateway, ok...
Don't even get me started about the inkjets.
So, yeah, long story short I'm sick of HP and will do anything to avoid buying/touching them in the future. Their tech support is lousy and flat out lies, they won't give proper driver support for their lousy products, and their products are shoddy to begin with.
They are truly an evil company who is going to take Compaq down with them, not that compaq was that spectacular to begin with.
Original disks are only part of the problem (Score:2, Interesting)
ON a related note Microsoft also encourages the practice of restore media, over the original disks. As a member of the OEM system builder program I have received requests to not include the original CD when selling an OEM Windows version on new systems.
Any companies selling computer at either Wal-Mart or Radio Shack have since stopped selling computers. The Wal-mart/Radio Shack kiss of death. Good riddance I say. Fare well proprietary Compaq, farewell sub-standard HP!
Re:views from an Ex-HP support technician (Score:3, Interesting)
You're absolutely right. I can't count the number of WD hard drives I've seen fail in the past few years. Pieces of shit, no doubt about it. But this is just in line with the general crappiness of hardware in the last few years. I got a monitor in 1995 that had dark spots on the screen. Returned it for a good one. Got another monitor in late 1999 that had its convergence shot to hell, replaced it with another one where half the screen was a lovely shade of purple. And don't even get me started on shitty modems. God, I've had to try to support those things. How anyone expects to get a stable connection out of something they paid $10 for is beyond me. And once these pieces of shit get to consumers, who has to support them? The modem makers? Yeah, right. You're lucky to find any kind of support phone number for many of the low-end vendors. Nope, the ISPs get to take these calls. Ditto for Internet Explorer and Windows's network components. MS makes the cash off these programs, yet when they start flaking out, the providers get the calls, not MS. And to return to hardware for a minute, has anyone actually had a successful tech support call with a motherboard maker? I have a friend who was only able to get someone to speak with him after calling the board maker's office in Taiwan. Luckily, he speaks Chinese.
I really must say that the state of computer support these days just plain sucks. And speaking of HP, a friend's mom bought one of those things a few weeks ago. She was having modem problems so my friend called HP. The tech had her open the case and find the modem. He had her pull it out, then told her to...and I'm not making this up...plug it back into the big green thing that everything is plugged into. When she replied, "You mean the motherboard?" he said, "Is that what it's called? Oh cool!"