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With all the bad moves HP has made recently, this is a good one. Although my testimony is likely not worth much, I feel it's important to convey why I think HP

With all the bad moves HP has made recently, this is a good one. Although my testimony is likely not worth much, I feel it's important to convey why I think HP's PC division is worth keeping around. My boss' HP desktop died, he brought it to me to see if I could fix it quickly, and I went through the steps on HP's website to "troubleshoot" it. I was pretty sure the power supply was dead, and I sent an email to support explaining all the steps I went through to determine that. There was an option on the page to list experience level, and I put it at the max. The first response I got was that they would send a shipping box for it and that they would replace the PSU. They 1) trusted their customer and 2) didn't back and forth, wasting their time and mine. I got the box within a few days and returned the system to HP. It was back within 3 days (this is a week total from initial contact to returned system), and the hard drive wasn't even reformatted. This is the kind of service that I am used to from Apple (fix it and forget it), and it renewed my hope in HP, but this was a little over a year ago, so who knows what's going on now.

martey 15y ago
While I have heard good things from a couple of people about HP's business support, my personal experiences with their consumer support division have been wanting. My HP laptop has a locked BIOS that prevents you from replacing the wireless card. I sent them an email message describing the BIOS error message that was returned and asking for more information about what were valid wireless cards for the machine. I received a reply telling me to reinstall my wireless card drivers. Over the next few days, I tried to get someone who understood my issue, but was repeatedly told to reinstall drivers, to reseat the card, and a variety of other solutions that seemed to come from some wireless troubleshooting customer support script. I called, and the person I talked to eventually told me to send the computer in, because "the depot would have a different unlocked BIOS that they could put on". When my computer arrived at the depot, I talked to: - a technician who was sympathetic but very confused about why phone support told me to send my computer to the depot, - two case managers who started out by telling me that they were "non-technical" who I had to explain what a BIOS was, and - a rude senior case manager who yelled at me for wasting everyone's time and told me "if you bought a car with a Sony stereo, you wouldn't expect a Panasonic stereo to work in it". When I told him that he was being rude and I wanted to provide feedback to someone about it, he told me that there was nobody else I could talk to, as his superiors would not want to hear from me. After a day of not hearing anything from the depot about when my computer would be returned, I called a HP executive support number I found on Consumerist or some other forum. The woman I talked to was exceedingly polite, but admitted she was non-technical, but then told me that my issue was "it was because HP wanted it that way" and even though it is in a user-accessible location, trying to install a different wireless card would void my warranty "just like installing Linux." A week or so later, HP released a BIOS update to include more wireless cards on the internal whitelist, in order to support the version of the laptop in the Small Business store (same components, starting price was $300 higher).

martey 15y ago

While I have heard good things from a couple of people about HP's business support, my personal experiences with their consumer support division have been wanting. My HP laptop has a locked BIOS that prevents you from replacing the wireless card. I sent them an email message describing the BIOS error message that was returned and asking for more information about what were valid wireless cards for the machine. I received a reply telling me to reinstall my wireless card drivers. Over the next few days, I tried to get someone who understood my issue, but was repeatedly told to reinstall drivers, to reseat the card, and a variety of other solutions that seemed to come from some wireless troubleshooting customer support script. I called, and the person I talked to eventually told me to send the computer in, because "the depot would have a different unlocked BIOS that they could put on". When my computer arrived at the depot, I talked to: - a technician who was sympathetic but very confused about why phone support told me to send my computer to the depot, - two case managers who started out by telling me that they were "non-technical" who I had to explain what a BIOS was, and - a rude senior case manager who yelled at me for wasting everyone's time and told me "if you bought a car with a Sony stereo, you wouldn't expect a Panasonic stereo to work in it". When I told him that he was being rude and I wanted to provide feedback to someone about it, he told me that there was nobody else I could talk to, as his superiors would not want to hear from me. After a day of not hearing anything from the depot about when my computer would be returned, I called a HP executive support number I found on Consumerist or some other forum. The woman I talked to was exceedingly polite, but admitted she was non-technical, but then told me that my issue was "it was because HP wanted it that way" and even though it is in a user-accessible location, trying to install a different wireless card would void my warranty "just like installing Linux." A week or so later, HP released a BIOS update to include more wireless cards on the internal whitelist, in order to support the version of the laptop in the Small Business store (same components, starting price was $300 higher).