HP - A cautionary tale

What's going on with the computer...well...

The old one was dying. It was 12 or 13 years old anyway. But I found a great deal on a refurb from TigerDirect - $300 for a HP Pavilion a4313w. I've wanted a Pavilion for a long time and so I put aside my reservations over the refurb part and ordered it.

It showed up late last Monday. Tuesday I unpacked it and tried to run Win7 for the first time. It kept hanging and then it would give me the error screen. So after several attempts to get it going, I called technical support and got "Rami" who I could barely hear, in one of the overseas call centers.

He tried to tell me I had a virus and I needed to buy a recovery disk for $15. I said "I just took it out of the box, Rami. How did the virus get in there? Did you put it there?"

"No, no. You got it from the internet."

"I haven't been ON the INTERNET because I can't get it to BOOT UP!"

On top of this he kept telling me I had 59 days left on my warranty and I said "I just bought it. I get 90 days."  

"No, no. 59 days."

They really need to fire Rami and they really need to get rid of their overseas call centers because the whole thing is a scam. I just noticed today, when I was writing my review, that someone else was told they had a virus and had to buy a recover disk and since he didn't know better, he fell for the scam. That's sad.

There are thousands of unemployed Americans out there who would do a much better job than Rami and the overseas call center and represent HP in a much better light, instead of as a scam.

Unless of course they really want to be known as a scam company.

In any case, he told me to run a memory test, just to get me off the phone. So I did that, and amazingly enough, it booted up. And things were fine for all of about five minutes. I turned my back for 10 seconds to grab the box of software to upload, and the computer tried to reboot itself. Except it never did.

So I call technical support again. This time, I got David in call center in the United States. So nice to know HP actually does employ an American or two.

After two hours, it was determined I was shipped a machine with a faulty mother board. Don't they test these things before they ship them?

So they sent a box and I returned the computer. David was also kind enough to update my warranty information for I get my full 90 days. Personally, I think that should start on the day I get the computer back but...

Right now, the estimated shipping date is July 9th, almost a month from my purchase date of June 15th.

Needless to say, I'm mildly pissed by the whole situation. Don't buy HP folks, it's a pile of crap. Stick with Dell.

The 9th is the outside shipping date, he told me 5 to 7 business days to fix so I'm hoping I get it back sooner.

Since the old machine died, I went to storage and got the old-old Gateway, which has a 19Gig Hard Drive and 128K memory and which came with Win96 when I first got it. That was a while ago. LOL.

So I'm back online at least.

Guess I should go get my trash can now before it blows off down the street....