2. HP: That's The Old Way We Did It

From DJ Krypplephite (his online handle)

Back in the days of early Northwood, I had purchased an HP Pavilion 513n. (1.8 GHz Celeron, 256 MB PC2100, which I upgraded to 384, 60 GB HDD if I recall correctly.) It ran everything spectacularly, except when I started to do something a little bit heavier on the multimedia side, it would always do this weird sort of crash, where the entire thing would essentially shut down, yet run at full power. My monitor light stayed green. However all I got was a black screen. Okay, it's nothing on the heavy side of multimedia. Honestly I couldn't play a DVD without this happening, and sometimes it would happen for no reason at all. It all got me paranoid, and I learned Ctrl+S pretty fast. I still save everything I do after about every 5 seconds to this very day. Good habit, I suppose.

To make a ridiculously long story short, I called HP tech support constantly about this problem throughout the course of my one-year warranty. I'm not sure why they asked me if I still lived at the same address when I would call for the third time in a day, but that's S.O.P. I guess.

Throughout the course of this year, they had me disassemble my PSU, take out the hard drive I added (13 GB I had around the house), CPU (2.6 GHz Northwood upgrade I added), or soundcard (SB Live 5.1) I put in, uninstall and reinstall video drivers (integrated video . . . yeah I was thinking the same thing you are at the time), or just outright blame it on me.

I especially remember the time they had me manually disassemble my own PSU in my kitchen. They didn't really talk me through it all. They just told me to ignore anything about stickers being broken and unscrew anything holding it together. I accidentally disconnected the cable from the power button on the case to the motherboard. At the time, I didn't know enough about the internals of computers to simply slide it back on the pins it came off of, so I asked my tech support person where it went, and she said it didn't connect to anything; that it was the old way they did it. I was expected to believe the button magically turned the computer on. I literally asked her if the power switch turned on the computer by magic. She just repeated that it was the old way they did it.

So with a bit more digging around, (with her on the phone still), I managed to find the pins myself, and I went out of my way to vent my frustration on her. Not her fault, but don't work at a job you know nothing about, right?

For the prologue: After my warranty expired, they decided to tell me I had a bad motherboard, and for them to fix it, I would have to send it to them and essentially pay for a bunch of work to be done. I was not a happy camper. I never did get it fixed, but it did start me on the path toward learning everything there is about computer hardware. For that I thank HP. I ended up scrapping the HP and began building my own 2.6C Northwood machine. 'Twas quite the beast, but that's a different story.

All of this was back before they outsourced their tech support, so I had full-blooded Americans attempting to diagnose my problem. They couldn't just tell me to send it in in the first place, oh no.

I'm sure HP logged a few of my calls up there at corporate, and to this day I will never buy another HP product, EVER again.