5 hours. That's how much time I spent talking to HP support techs today -- on my day off. The hard drive on Lux's new laptop crapped out last week so after a small, only mildly painful phone call, I got a new hard drive shipped to us from HP. Well, I got the hard drive in along with a recovery dvd and started the recovery process. First time through, it gets all the way to the end, after fully installing Vista but it fails on a setup.exe timeout while adding some HP bloat crap. I think, "hmph" and start the recovery process again (1 recovery = 2.5 hours). After the 3rd time of this not working and my Google searches saying "bad recovery disk", I call HP support.

Even though I'd found several online forums with quite a few people experiencing the same problem, HP had never heard of such a thing and of course sat with me on the phone while I went through the recovery not once, not twice but three fucking times. What did we do differently between those three recoveries? Not a mother fucking thing. Once the 3rd recovery starts he asks that I call him back when it's about done and we'd try something different towards the end. I call back, get a different guy who wants me to stop the recovery and start it over again... but FIRST he asks that I reseat the hard drive.

Of course! the hard drive isn't properly seated!!! What the fuck was I thinking?!!! /sarcasm ..but I do it anyway and then start the recovery yet again. By this time I'm irate and demand a new recovery disk but no, it has to fail one last fucking time so he'll call back tomorrow to confirm that it didn't work.

Thanks for listening.

*finds gun*

*shoots Lux*

*shoots laptop*

*grabs a beer*

Heh heh heh. Screw the recovery disk, just format the damm drive and install the OS yourself. That would have saved you how many hours? All you would have needed to do is download all the necessary drivers for the hardware.

I would but I don't own a copy of Vista as HP doesn't ship a copy of the software to you. That would be wasteful.

I started to go to XP, installed it even but I'd rather skin my penis with a butter knife than deal with drivers for this laptop (I spent 3 hours today trying to acquire them all but because HP doesn't support XP on this laptop... yeah.)

Besides all that, I paid for Vista, Lux likes it so they need to fix this shit.

My dad recently retired after 19 years with HP (superdome servers- not consumer products). He said that when he started it was the best company in the industry- great high quality products and support and they treated their people very well (i remember company cars, company picnics with crazy good prizes for kids, cool holiday parties etc.) but in the last 10 years they've totally gone downhill and he hated working there at the end. My first desktop was an HP and I remember their tech support being awesome, but that was before they were indian, i think. Too bad...

Oh right. Shoot ME. Cuz it's MY fault. :(

Even after this retarded anger towards me, I made him a pumpkin cheesecake.

I have to call them for my work machines. I hate it. I am like computer says bad sectors, went into bios and it failed the hard drive test, need a new hard drive. They don't even ask me to try anything else. Never use those lame recovery disks.

Happy to hear it is all fixed.
I actually had a problem where I couldn't get the raid drivers to install with xp so I had to install vista and it already had the drivers. I have a slipstream xp disk with the drivers on that so I am going to try it when I reinstall.

I actuall have to reinstall my computer now but I have been lazy. There is a failed update on my computer and if I reboot it blue screens. I actually have to boot to safemode first and then into windows. Gotta love Microsoft. It has been up for a month now at least.

<3 my iMac.

HP Tech Support=Cake Karma.

Cake Dammit!

HP has the worst customer support ever. What got me was when, 7 years ago, a CD burner failed after 1 year adn 1 month. I could not even talk to a tech support person without paying them 20 bucks up front. I know this is more standard now, but HP paved the way. The only products HP makes now I will even think about buying are printers, simply because they do make good printers that seem to last forever. Otherwise, nothing more technical at all.

On a related note, becuase of consumer backlash and rising prices of support in Indian, a lot of companies are actually moving support back to the US. But, watch out for support moving to Vietnam and/or China as more english speaker are trained in the next 5-7 years.

I love HP printers. They work best with our citrix environment. They do seem to last forever and I also love their laptops.

I have an HP printer and it is awesome. It did break once about a year after we bought it but we brought it to a local printer repair shop and the fixed it right up. Since then it's been working fine. *Knock on wood*