Don't buy HP

Looks like if it's going to happen to someone, it's going to happen to me.

On 1 Dec, my six-month old laptop, my dearest possession, became a statistic. I shut it down that morning, took it to work, booted it, and was met with a HDD failure notification.

Well, shit...

So, I got on the phone with HP "technical support", spoke to some very nice people who couldn't speak a lick of English, and was told that I would have to supply a credit card before they would ship my replacement HDD.

Well, after two days of escalating, talking to supervisors, and beating the dead horse, I gave up a credit card number. Well, there was no money available on it and they told me they couldn't use it - even though they said they weren't going to charge anything to it unless I failed to return the bad HDD.

Well, I begged, pleaded, and yelled at them and they finally said that they would waive the card requirement and would ship my HDD. This was 3 Dec and my drive was to be here 9 Dec.

Days go by... I check daily on the status of my shipment and each day the web site tells me that it has not shipped, but will be next-day FEDEX'd to me and arrive by 9 DEC. Until today.

This morning I opened the site for my daily check and it said the order was canceled. WTF?! Another call to tech support reveals that it was canceled due to a credit card with not enough funds available. I ask how much is needed and they tell me $3-400. WTF again!

More yelling, screaming, and telling them that I wanted to speak to someone I could understand got nowhere FAST. I ended up calling the regional offices for the US and spoke to a very nice (English speaking) case manager by the name of Christine. She waived the card requirement and my drive should be here by 12 Dec - just in time for me to work on my computer while recovering from surgery.

We'll see if it makes it this time.

So, again: Don't buy HP. Their tech support can't communicate with their largest market, they are rather unwilling to make reasonable considerations to repair their defective products, and...

They suck ;)