HP to Keep PC Division

Although my testimony is likely not worth much, I feel it's important to convey why I think HP's PC division is worth keeping around.

My boss' HP desktop died, he brought it to me to see if I could fix it quickly, and I went through the steps on HP's website to "troubleshoot" it. I was pretty sure the power supply was dead, and I sent an email to support explaining all the steps I went through to determine that. There was an option on the page to list experience level, and I put it at the max.

The first response I got was that they would send a shipping box for it and that they would replace the PSU.

They 1) trusted their customer and 2) didn't back and forth, wasting their time and mine.

I got the box within a few days and returned the system to HP. It was back within 3 days (this is a week total from initial contact to returned system), and the hard drive wasn't even reformatted.

This is the kind of service that I am used to from Apple (fix it and forget it), and it renewed my hope in HP, but this was a little over a year ago, so who knows what's going on now.

In my opinion, it's much better than iOS for tablets and larger devices (the perfect TV?) but the clock is ticking. Every day HP wastes with decisions like "should we kill one of our largest sources of revenue?" Apple is right next door developing amazing products for tomorrow like Siri.

My HP laptop has a locked BIOS that prevents you from replacing the wireless card. I sent them an email message describing the BIOS error message that was returned and asking for more information about what were valid wireless cards for the machine. I received a reply telling me to reinstall my wireless card drivers. Over the next few days, I tried to get someone who understood my issue, but was repeatedly told to reinstall drivers, to reseat the card, and a variety of other solutions that seemed to come from some wireless troubleshooting customer support script.

I called, and the person I talked to eventually told me to send the computer in, because "the depot would have a different unlocked BIOS that they could put on". When my computer arrived at the depot, I talked to:

- a technician who was sympathetic but very confused about why phone support told me to send my computer to the depot,

- two case managers who started out by telling me that they were "non-technical" who I had to explain what a BIOS was, and

- a rude senior case manager who yelled at me for wasting everyone's time and told me "if you bought a car with a Sony stereo, you wouldn't expect a Panasonic stereo to work in it". When I told him that he was being rude and I wanted to provide feedback to someone about it, he told me that there was nobody else I could talk to, as his superiors would not want to hear from me.

After a day of not hearing anything from the depot about when my computer would be returned, I called a HP executive support number I found on Consumerist or some other forum. The woman I talked to was exceedingly polite, but admitted she was non-technical, but then told me that my issue was "it was because HP wanted it that way" and even though it is in a user-accessible location, trying to install a different wireless card would void my warranty "just like installing Linux."

A week or so later, HP released a BIOS update to include more wireless cards on the internal whitelist, in order to support the version of the laptop in the Small Business store (same components, starting price was $300 higher).