For the longest time, I was against HP. I had heard that their products were shoddy, so I steered clear of them. Then, a couple years ago, I decided to try them out, buying a printer for both myself and my wife. It seemed that everybody was using HP stuff, so it couldn’t me that bad, could it?
I even planned on buying a nice new souped-up desktop computer of theirs at Best Buy within the next couple months. The Best Buy salesman had nothing but good things to say about HP (of course).
However, there have been 2 big incidents in the past couple weeks that have made me wish nothing but death and destruction upon HP.
Incident #1: The Cheap and Dirty Podcast
I love this podcast. When its host Dave came on and said he’d have to put the podcast on hiatus for upwards of a month, I was flung deep into the throes of suicidal depression. Well, maybe not exactly that, but I was bummed. The reason for the hiatus? His HP laptop was going in for repairs (apparently for the 3rd time or so), and it would take several weeks for it to come back. All becaue HP can’t make a decent piece of hardware.
Myself — I have a Sony VAIO laptop that I’ve run just about all day every day for the past 2 years, and the son of a bitch is still going strong. Dave, if I could give it up, I would send it to you man. Unfortunately, it’s the computer that enables me to put food on the table.
Listen to the Cheap and Dirty Podcast here.
Incident #2: HP Tech Support
This is good.
Last week, my HP printer started acting up. I’ve only had it a couple years, and it had worked reasonably fine, although I used it maybe twice a month on average. The error message was telling me “Carriage Jam,” so I checked that the cartidges were seated correctly, and did so until the error went away. But then I immediately got an “Out of Paper” error, despite the fact there was paper in it.
So I got on the phone to tech support, which, as we all know, has been outsourced to our Hindu friends. I spoke with some lady I could barely understand, who demanded my phone number.
“Why do you need my phone number?” I asked.
“It’s policy,” she answered. “We respect your privacy, and will use your number to let you know about important updates and offers.”
I told her I wasn’t comfortable giving this information out, because all I use is a cell phone. She kept demanding the phone number, and began RAISING HER VOICE. This pissed me off — she flew right off the handle.
After asking her to speak with her supervisor half a dozen times, she finally gave in and put me on hold for over 10 minutes. Then Apu got on the line, asking me what the problem was. I told him that I felt I was being mistreated by the lady I had just spoken to, and demanded and explanation.
“We’ll take care of that after I solve your printer problem,” he said, and then proceeded to troubleshoot my printer. This was a lie, because he never addressed the problem with the lady.
Anyhow, he came to the conclusion that my printer was shot and that I would need a new one. He gave me two options: pay for a technician, or buy a new one right there and then. I told him that based on how I was treated, I will never purchase another HP product again. This didn’t seem to bother him at all.
“Thank you, have a nice day,” he said, and hung up.
What the hell kind of service is that?! First of all, I was on the phone much, much longer than I should have been because I had to keep asking these people to repeat themselves. I could not understand them. Second, the first lady yells at me for not revealing my personal information. Third, the “supervisor” tries to get more money out of me and ignores the problem I had with the lady.
That’s HP for you. Like I said, never again. I was a few weeks away from dropping over $1000 on a new computer, but I’ll opt for a Dell or a Sony. Screw HP.
Its getting worse. The problem this time around is that it wouldn’t charge, so they sent me a new power adapter. I just found out the new adapter was the wrong kind (65 watt instead of 90). So now I have to call and wait on hold to do an exchange, plus they’re replacing the mobo… for the third time.
Its a shame because my wife has my old Compaq (same company) that’s several years old and its rolling along. Time to get a Dell, the XPS m1330 looks nice plus I can get it with Ubuntu pre-installed and avoid the MS tax.
Ubuntu rocks! It’s the way to go. If I wasn’t so heavily dependent on Photoshop and Illustrator, I’d scrap Windows for good and go all Linux. I currently have one Ubuntu machine, and it’s slick as hell. Runs fast, never crashes, totally reliable.
Yeah, I have an 8 year old machine running Ubuntu now and its dependable (slow, but, then again its an 8 year old machine). Sadly, when I bought the PC that’s now in for repairs I wasn’t thinking andgot an AMD processor which means its got a broadcom chipset for the wireless which means its a real pain to set up linux on it.
The only applications that I use that are windows dependent are Itunes (which recently I’ve gotten over that) and Sony Vegas, but I may just run that from the media center desktop.
Have you tried Wine? I’m tempted to, but haven’t had the guts or time to experiment with it.
For awhile I used the propitiatory version of it called CrossOffice in order to specifically use Powerpoint (which I need for my job, but OpenOffice does a relatively good job of it now), and my experience was that it did a decent job. Like most of these things the more people who use a particular piece of software with Wine/Cross Office the better a chance it works seamlessly.
Oh, also, if you’re buying a new desktop Dell has some nice ones that come without an OS. They’re the business class desktop (N series), have some good specs, and are some of the cheapest I’ve seen around.
I use ONLY LINUX!!! I have a Ubuntu box running as a file server and I run OpenSuse on my laptop. I realize that for you designers that Photoshop is basically a necessity and since my company works mainly with MS software they wanted me to run only Windows. However, I was never going to agree to that. I tried to run Office in Wine with success. However, it didn’t work as smoothly as I would have liked and crashed a lot. I dealt with it until I started to use Photoshop. I got Photoshop running in wine and I dealt with it for a while, but it just became too cumbersome.
I went the VM route. This was a Godsend to me. Basically I installed Windows to run my Photoshop/Office/Visio/MS Project. I just fired up my VM first thing and created a bunch of shared folders (shared between my Windows and the host system), tweaked some settings and I was good to go. I realize that I still had to have a license (after all, I use it for work), but lo and behold the unused key on the sticker on the bottom of my laptop.
The only problem is that I’ve only used VMWare which isn’t free. I know that some of my co-workers use free vm players, but I can’t give a personal review on any of them. Google to the rescue.
I guess as a web designer, I can never really be fully liberated from Windows . . . making web sites involves ensuring the site looks good and behaves how it should in multiple browsers on multiple platforms . . . IE/Win, IE/Mac, Firefox, Opera, Safari . . . ugh.
You’re a lucky guy Mike.