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HP Dishonors Warranty If You Load Linux
darkonc points us to a writeup on linux.com about a very Linux-unfriendly policy at HP. A woman bought a Compaq laptop and loaded Ubuntu on it. Some time later, still well inside the 1-year hardware warranty, the keyboard started acting up. An HP support rep told her, "Sorry, we do not honor our hardware warranty when you run Linux." Gateway and Dell refused to comment to the reporter on what they would do in a similar situation. (Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.)
If Linux probes your hardware (monitor) and selects the incorrect settings, could that not potentially harm your screen? I am not saying Windows is not capable or the same problem, but at least you are not trouble shooting an entire OS. How does the woman know that she has not messed up some keyboard setting on Ubuntu? I would not want to be the tech who must troubleshoot over the phone a system which has a different OS than that which is installed. I love Linux, but you have to draw the line on troubleshooting somewhere.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
I had the keyboard start acting up as well on mine. In addition the hard drive crashed sometime later.
In order for them to do ANY service on it..
A) I had to replace the hard drive with one that worked.
B) Install windows on that hard drive
C) Submit laptop to HP to get the keyboard fixed.
D) Get Laptop back..
E) Put bad hard drive back in
F) Ship it back to HP in order for them to fix the bad drive.
I pretty told them to pound sand and bought a keyboard replacement on ebay.
I will NEVER own another HP again.
If you go that route, and have to send the machine back for a repair, leave the hard drive out of it when you send it to them. Is it unreasonable to request that the customer keeps the hard drive (sensitive information) when they back to the manufacturer for repair?
This is one of the reasons why whenever I buy a PC I never remove windows. I just shrink the partition to it's minimal size plus a GB or two, install linux, set it to default. Sometimes I even remove Windows from the grub menu.lst so I can't choose it by accident :)
There are several reasons you should not uninstall windows. One is what this article is about, warranty support. If you ever have a hardware issue you can just delete the linux paritions (after a backup) and ship the thing; unless the tech has some weird reason to do forensic analysis on the HD they will never know it ever had linux on it.
There are other reasons too - wine works better with some applications when you can point it at some actual windows DLLs. Also, you have the ability to boot into Windows to play the occasional game or other multimedia nonsense that don't work in Linux.
Really I don't know why someone who bought a PC that came with Windows, which THEY PAID FOR, would just go erase it anyways. It's a total waste of money, and you aren't sending anyone a "message".
Disk space is dirt cheap. Until you can buy PCs barebones with the Windows tax removed, IMO it is ill-advised to un-install.
Linux isn't perfect, but most Linux desktop users know what they're doing well enough to fix it themselves when something goes wrong, or they know where to look to get the information without calling tech support. In my experience in tech support, 99% of all Windows tech support calls are either virus/spyware related, or the customer did something stupid without knowing what they're doing and now the system is "broken". So yes, in my experience, if a Linux user is calling in about an issue, you can be fairly sure that something is well and truly fucked and you (or your employers) are going to be on the hook for it.
This poo is cold.
Just about every personal computer since mid 90's (Macs excepted) is designed to run a flavor of Windows. Do you wonder why most probably there are no Alpha or MIPS desktop computers around you? That's right - because there is no version of Windows and Office for them. Do you think Intel and AMD could not make a multi-core processor until about last year? They could do it since almost ever (I have seen multi-processor 386 systems), but there would be next to no market for them as Windows 98 couldn't use more than one processor.
Truth is - most computers are really designed to run Windows and this has inhibited or postponed many technical advances. We still use glorified 5150's.
BTW, manufacturers are quite happy with this.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Specifically I was working for the support group for XP SP2 when it first came out. MS basically has each group supporting more or less a specific application. In my case thier attitude was they they did not know exactly what issues to expect out of the gate, but that the sole priority was making the customer happy. Now admittedly that is slightly different than fixing the problem. You can fix the problem, but treat the customer poorly or have a bad attitude and still piss them off, or you can be very helpful and polite and make the customer happy most of the time, even if you cannot find an immediate solution to the technical problem.
I do know that with MS, the only metric they held us to was that when they did the random call backs to survey customer satisfaction we better have at least a 90% rating of making the customer happy, no call time, no minimum number of calls per day, no pushing for sales, none of the other BS that Dell and ESPECIALLY Gateway put on thier techs. Dell was reasonable, Gateway wanted sales people that could read a checklist more than they wanted real techs and ran a lot of good techs off that way.
I sole-boot linux on a Dell, and when my file system got corrupted, I ran badblocks to make sure it was a hard disk issue. It turned out to be a bunch of bad sectors in the middle of my drive. So I called Dell, completely explained the situation, including the sole-boot and running badblocks, and not only did the guy not hang up on me, he started talking about linux with me and seemed actually supportive of it. He asked me to boot into the recovery partition (which I had obviously deleted), so I told him I wiped it, and he asked me to boot onto the recovery CD. The regular CD diagnostics that he told me to run was just a simple memtest and a very high level HDD read test, both of which passed. I knew the disk was dead though, so I told him I was going to run some other of Dell's tests (they have multiple HDD tests), and he said he would call me back. He called back in about an hour, and sure enough there were multiple read errors. I got my new disk (they even gave me an extra 40GB free) overnight. So whatever HP does, and whatever crap Dell takes, Dell still gets my support for their support.
If you read carefully you'll see they didn't claim that installing linux "voids the warranty" (though the article, confusingly, suggests that they did). At least not as I understand the term. I thought it referred to something unreversible--like dropping it off a tall building.
They asked her to wipe the system and restore the original OS before returning the laptop.
Which is still annoying--it shouldn't be that hard for them just to boot the thing from a diagnostic disk if they want to test with a known software configuration. I'd think the sensible thing would be to say "ship it to us, but back it up first; if we suspect a software problem we reserve the right to return the disk to its original state before returning it, but we'll try not to do that unless it's necessary."