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Not A Graceful Recovery For HP Customers

Posted by timothy on from the you'd-better-be-good-and-crashed dept.

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.

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  1. views from an Ex-HP support technician by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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.....