The ongoing saga of my HP Laptop

As readers of this blog may be aware, I bought myself a HP G70-111EM laptop back in January, however had to return it for repair following a burning smell when booting. For many years, I have used only Toshiba laptops, but was convinced by a special offer in my local electronics store.

I received the repaired unit back from HP last Thursday. For two days it was fine, but upon booting it this morning, had exactly the same symptoms as when I sent it in for repair. I telephoned HP and asked whether I could have a replacement unit, as clearly mine was unfit for purpose. I was informed that no, I had to send it in for a further repair. This means that out of ownership for one month, I have had 5 days usage from this machine.

I have sent an email to the CEO of HP in the UK asking him to take some remedial action before I start bringing in big guns such as Trading Standards etc.

Their response will be posted here.

Interesting ones from yesterday

The laptop turned out to have a large number of trojans on it, which were detected after booting from my ultimate boot disk. Whilst I had the machine booted, I backed up the users documents to a removable USB drive, then re-formatted the hard drive and re-installed XP just to be on the safe side.

No news on the email case.

A couple of interesting ones

The first is a laptop that the user reports has a virus, it keeps re-booting when CTRL-ALT-DEL is pressed to log in. The user states this happens in both safe mode and normal and thinks it is a virus. I'm not so sure - I'm going in tomorrow to carry out a data recovery and will post back the actual cause.

The second is a user complaining about not receiving emails. I have asked that he gets the senders to send me their bounce messages so I can investigate further. There is no filtering on the server other than to flag spam/viruses.

I'll keep you all posted.

HP Technical Support

Whilst on a client site on Monday, I plugged my new HP laptop in to carry out some checks and found that some of the smoke that makes it work escaped.

Not a major problem thinks I, I'll log it with their technical support when I get back to my office...

The error report was raised fairly easily, usual sort of stuff...purchase date, serial number etc. I then sat back to await their response.

Within an hour an email had arrived advising me to fill out a questionaire (serial number, date of purchase etc). All of these details were conveniently attached to the bottom of their email. This was filled out and sent back.

Approximately two hours later a subsequent email was received advising me that they needed to escalate my call and could I provide some details (serial number, date of purchase etc). Is this starting to get familiar?

I finally received a phone call from them advising that a courier would collect my laptop for repair today.

I'm not sure about you, but I would have expected a company like Hewlett Packard to have a more joined-up support system.