Rant: HP Products - My Experience

[russ_watters]

This could go in general technology, but I'm not looking for help or advice - I just want to rant...

About 3 years ago now, I bought myself an HP 17" Centrino laptop and talked my boss into 6 HP desktops. All have been a joy to use. My laptop, especially, is a thing of beauty. But they all have technical problems that are now becoming terminal.

My laptop just threw its 3rd (I think - the first two happened at the same time) hard drive. This last one died with a screech, taking my last couple of months of astrophotos (fortunately there weren't many of those) and quite a bit of other stuff with it. Now, a week after I spent 8 hours reinstalling all my software, the laptop seems to be dead. I'm chatting with HP tech support right now...

About 6 months ago, the desktops started killing power supplies. It looks to me like HP picked crappy and/or too small PSUs, but when they die they sometimes take other parts (ie, the motherboard) with them. Strangely, the PSUs appear good to a testing device I have, so I sometimes have trouble diagnosing them. I've probably fixed about 4 and currently have two down. And today, my machine threw a stick of ram. Fortunatly, that one didn't take too long to fix (at home in front of the tv) since I now have a workspace spread out on the floor in my family room, complete with plenty of spare parts...

HP says I need to take the laptop to a service center - there is one down the street. If its going to cost more than a few hundred to fix, I'll probably just get a new laptop. And we're going to start buying Dell's to replace the HP desktops at work.

 

[Rach3]

Watch out with Dells - they explode!

 

[Cyrus]

Odd. I have two computers, a new Dell, and an old HP 9694C. The HP originally came with win 98. The thing used to crash left and right on win98. After I upgraded it to xp a few years ago, it runs like a champ. I have not had to replace a single thing in it, aside from memory upgrade, keyboard and mouse upgrade, and a flat screen. The actual computer and hard drive itself is still the same from about 98' or 99'

My dell also works like a champ. Really am pleased with Dell. I like their products.

 

[wolram]

My Dell Latitude is still steaming along, some times it slows up, i call it having a Cyrus day, some times it can be really annoying, i call that having a penguin day, most days it works just fine.

 

[Kalimaa23]

The HP laptop I bought some three years ago is a godawfull piece of crap. It crashes like hell (both on XP home and professional) and the hard disk runs about as smooth as an old granny.

The only laptop I've ever been completely satisfied with is a P233 Compaq. Of course it's completely out of date now, but I still run it to make LaTeX files and such.

 

[FredGarvin]

Uh oh. I hope this isn't an omen. My HP laptop is about a year old, but runs like a champ. I love it. I hope they're not like cars...3 years and everything goes to pot.

 

[vanesch]

I have to say I'm pretty happy with both my laptop and my desktop of very unknown suppliers (which I bought as a promotion in the local supermarket), while my Dell desktop at the office (together with two Dell desktops of collegues) had their hard disk die during the first 3 months of operation.
My home desktop (5 years old now) did have a power supply failure and a ventilator problem, which was fixed for ~80 Euros last year, but that's all the trouble I got with it.

 

[Astronuc]

Uh oh. I hope this isn't an omen. My HP laptop is about a year old, but runs like a champ. I love it. I hope they're not like cars...3 years and everything goes to pot.

You just jinxed yourself by posting in this thread.

My company gets custom built machines from a small local shop which has a good reputation. We agree on mother board, memory, HD's (in removable bays) with redundancy, power supply, NIC, etc - and they build them. We also stay with Win2K for now, because of compatability issues regarding OS/Apps.

We buy off-the-shelf laptops. Well, I haven't seen a laptop yet that hasn't had some type of problem.

One thing on laptops - depending on the battery and where it is located (along the lines of the exploding Dell laptop) - they can overheat if air circulation is impeded. Putting a laptop on a bed or couch or something like a soft cushion can lead to overheating, depeding on the design. And overheating can damage the battery such that it produces more overheating in a positive feedback situation - IME.