In the ongoing saga of My Compaq nw9440 laptop, the DC power cable coming from my power supply developed a break and subsequently caused the repeated full draining of my battery, which will now not charge above 49%. So I decided to try the online chat system and see if it works on Firefox/Linux - which, amazingly, it does. I tried to use it less than a year ago and was rebuffed, so I took this to be an encouraging sign. You'd think that by this point in my life, I would know better...
This is not the first time I've had problems with this system, or the second time, either. There's no cap on the zero travel mouse (also known as a trackpoint or under various other trade names) because HP can't seem to make it out of sufficiently hard plastic; I'll probably get some IBM caps eventually, they never seem to cause problems on my Thinkpad A21p. But more tellingly, my earlier DVD-ROM replacement experience wasn't the last time I would have problems getting the right part out of HP. Unfortunately, getting a replacement laptop power supply is problematic as well.
A package from HP showed up after just two days. In it was a small, slim power supply, which was a cause for concern because my laptop has a gigantic behemoth of a black brick for a power supply. Inspection of the part numbers and various specifications demonstrated that not only was it not the proper replacement part number, nor was it even in the same family of power supplies, but both voltage and power output were insufficient for my laptop. I haven't actually tried to plug it in, but it looks as if it might actually go. Hooking an insufficient power supply to a computer is a good way to burn something up, although I'll admit that the most likely candidate is the fuse in the power supply. In this case, the voltage level was just 0.5V low, which is unlikely to cause any harm. But if they had sent me a power supply for something other than the LCD monitor that came up when the original internet support "technician" punched up my serial number, the potential for harm might have been greater.
This brings me to the real meat of this post, though. My approximately hour and twenty-five minutes spent on the phone with various HP support personnel has taught me that HP is lost. Yes, friends, lost. It has no idea where it is, where it is going, or how it would get to any particular destination if it knew where it was. And it's lost because one part of the company has no idea what any other part is doing, because they don't know themselves, either. My laptop is a great example because of the craziness that's been associated with it. Getting the wrong DVD-burner is perhaps a simple matter of someone grabbing from the wrong stack. But when I spoke to a tech and was told that when she punched in my serial number, an LCD monitor came up, it became clear where the wonky little power supply had come from.
After hearing my sob story, an HP technician eventually decided to replace my battery while re-replacing my power supply, this time with the right part (verified by matching with the damaged one I've got.) So here's the real issue; HP could have spent another dime on the power supply cable and come up with a better unit. For lack of that, a support call was generated. Because HP is apparently reusing serial numbers across product lines, it was possible for a tech to get my serial number right and get a totally different product. Because HP hired some total bozo to do internet support (perhaps through some other company, of course) I got the wrong product. HP had to pay to ship that product to me because I have a 3 year extended support contract.
But it gets better still, of course; HP has whole procedures for RMAs. In order to get that power supply back now, since they didn't include the shipping label in the box they sent me, they would have to send me a whole new box and bubble wrap envelope with a new shipping label in order to get the power supply back, which would cost more money, so they're not going to do that. Because power supplies are clipped and usually glued together rather than being screwed, they can't fix them in a cost-effective manner even though the power cable is probably plugged and not soldered onto the board in the power supply. If they took them back they would just landfill them anyway, because they are not designed to be recycled. So HP has sent me a LCD power supply probably destined for landfill (but I will probably try eBay) and left me with a damaged laptop power supply which is of course headed in the same direction, only faster and sooner.
For lack of a dime here and a nickel there, hundreds of dollars were wasted.
Finally, let me just say that I am not buying another HP product until they do away with their horrible, terrible voice-recognition-only phone menu system. They want me to use their chat system for support, so they try to drive me away from the phone. Then they provide me with a chat support guy who can't tell an LCD from a laptop. (Laptops have LCDs, right?) This is not a working solution. The bloody thing doesn't work worth a damn if I'm on a cellphone anyway, and I often have to be. I'm the customer, if you want to ever sell me another $2300 laptop, you'd better make it possible for me to utilize my several-hundred-dollar support contract, too.
Of course, to be fair, I'm not sure where else that laptop would come from, given that last I checked Apple didn't offer professional-level graphics, Lenovo is charging even more than IBM did, and Dell seems to stop around the "GT" level. Until the Open-Source ATI drivers come up to speed (ATI has all of one employee busily segregating the ATI material from other companies' intellectual "property" as we speak) I'm sticking with nVidia...