Chris’s Blog

I don’t have much to talk about today, but I thought I would enlighten you as to the treatment Dell Support provided. This is regarding an older Dell Laptop (Inspiron 1150) that had a motherboard issue. After calling Dell twice – i didn’t have to wait anywhere near as long as with HP, I had moaned enough that they would arrange pickup and repair of the laptop – FREE OF CHARGE -More… as the laptop had been out of warranty for almost a year. Hows that? A++ Dell for your support, I really appreciate being treated like a valued customer, which is nothing like the horrendous support provided by HP. Too bad there were no finance options available for Dell Laptops, otherwise I wouldn’t have bought an HP.

Got a nice new laptop (dv1610tn) from a retail store – no problems except the backup software will not create the restore cd’s as stupid hp do not supply discs with the laptops anymore. So, after installing all my stuff into the laptop, and discovering the computer wouldn’t create the recovery disc set – and waiting on the hp support phone line for half and hour, I decided to try the online support team. More…This was a nightmare ! After working out that the support team were either a bunch of semi-smart monkeys, or 13 year old tecchie wanna bees i gave up on them also. So, in the end, I wasted about 7 hours of reinstalling software, debugging and troubleshooting myself (nothing really helped from HP) I decided to give up.

I decided that if there would be a fatal system crash I would send it to HP and let them deal with it then. The actual suggestion from HP was to send the laptop back (less than a day old) and they would re image the whole machine! And for those of you out there who might be interested, the issue was “PC Recovery Disc Creator” not being able to create the restore image (error 20), although after a HP noob suggested I delete the image file that the software uses (it may be corrupt etc…) the software doesn’t even try anymore. I GIVE UP YOU HP BASTARDS – ILL SEND YOU MY INVOICE FOR 7 HOURS OF WASTED TIME ON A BRAND NEW LAPTOP