Not A Graceful Recovery For HP Customers

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.

Comments

Why not CD's

[quantaman]

I don't see their problem with shipping half a dozen or more CDs. When I got my computer it came with 6 cds just for MS worksuite (none of which I use since I got staroffice;). Cds are much cheaper than hard drive space and i'd rather just have them give me a bunch of image files and rip the cds off that. I wonder if the recovery cds could be used to pirate windows XP, if so I suspect that is the real reason for their reluctance.

HP Bites

[Inthewire]

This past November, my father's computer crashed with multiple hardware failures.
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

[Anonymous Coward]

"For many years, one of the primary reasons for support calls have been people who have lost their recovery CDs," says Bruce Greenwood, North American marketing manager for HP's Pavilion line.

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.....

Re:views from an Ex-HP support technician

[SomeoneYouDontKnow]

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!"

Long overdue

[whereiswaldo]

Unfortunately, I have a Packard Bell computer. It's the same old tune in this story, except with HP. I didn't get an original Windows 98 CD with my machine which really ticked me off, but fortunately I had access to a real Win98 CD so I didn't bother making a huge fuss.

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

[Graymalkin]

If you're a vendor it makes sense not to package installation media along with your product. While two slashdotters shit themselves at the suggestion just now it is true. Selling a low margin product doesn't make you a whole lot of money thus you need to sell the extras like a support contract, you know the thing a saleman tries to forcibly ram up your ass? If you give a customer the ability to fix their computer qualms with little hassle you are asking to be put in operational red. There's a percentage of people who can fix a computer at least marginally, statistically people who don't know how to fix their computer know at least one person they can bother because their "printer got a virus and the power light doesn't come on anymore", the sort of people who inspire ever so funny Tech Support from Hell banter. These people often work for free or at least for much less than it costs to pay a "professional" (sic) to fix their problem. This ain't no good for suppliers of service contracts like OEMs. If Grandma decides the pie chart of her disk space has too much blue on it she is going to start hitting the delete key, nevermind she just deleted all the DLL files her favourite program needed to run. The purple wedge got bigger. If she can call up grandson/daughter to come over to fix her now useless program that comes up with twenty missing file errors who merely inserts an install disk and is done with the whole mess the OEMs just lost out on some lucrative nickel and diming. A recovery partition or special recovery disk can at least obfuscate things just enough to garner a couple extra support contracts from people. OEMs also want to get software back on systems they spent a pretty penny for to put there in the first place. This might be useless crap but they just want some eyeball time on it.

How about the EULA

[jgerman]

I buy an HP, HP techs (and I use the term loosely) agreed to the click thorough license, (legally binding in MD). I never agreed to it, I never saw it. So I now have a copy of Windows which I can do whatever I want with. Somehow I doubt I could get away with cpying it and re-distibuting it, but now legally even with UCITA, I can reverse engineer it or whatever.