HP Gives Gal Warranty By Accident, Knows It, Lets Her Replace Laptop Anyway

Donni is totally stoked! She bought a refurb HP laptop that kicked the bucket after its 90-day warranty expired. She gave up hope but then HP randomly sent her an email asking her if she wanted to renew her warranty. Donni called them up and they scratched their heads and said, yeah, that shouldn’t have happened, but they went ahead and let her get the warranty and replace her laptop anyway. For this reason, Donni is very happy with HP.

Donni writes:

Hello Consumerist!

I have been an avid reader for a while now and today I had the most wonderful experience with a company and I wanted to share my story:

In February, I purchased a refurbished (yes, I know about buying refurbs) HP laptop from Tiger Direct. In, or around August, I started experiencing some issues with the unit overheating and then randomly powering off. I googled this and found that with this particular model it was a known issue but since it had been 90 days (HP and Tiger’s warranty on refurbished products) I figured I couldn’t make a claim, so I went ahead and purchased a cooling fan. This worked until October when the laptop just decided that it had had enough and completely stopped working (wouldn’t even turn on) I phoned Tiger Direct and they confirmed what I already knew about the warranty, and so I retired my computer to its shoulder bag and into the closet. Upset that I had this $600 paper weight in my closet, I consulted with a friend who is computer savvy and he felt that it really would not be worth my money to repair. I accepted his advice and once again, back into the closet the computer went…

Then, like some kind of divine miracle, an email shows up in my mailbox from Hewlett-Packard, stating that my warranty is set to expire and that I should extend. aroo?, a warranty? hmmmm…. Initially, I thought this was some kind of scam, so I immediately phoned HP and explain the situation. The support staff was kind, but they were puzzled as to why I had received this email and that it was certainly in error. My case was eventually turned over to Susan in the elevated support department. She had me forward the email and said she would return my call with some sort of resolve. Well, to my complete happiness, she phoned me and said that she could not explain the email and that I should not have received it, but that she would go ahead and send me a box to ship my broken laptop in, and they would repair, and ship it back to me, with NO COST to me!!

They very easily could have told me that I was out of luck, I knew that I was not within warranty and they did not have to do anything for me. All I really just wanted them to do was repair it at a discount. But, Susan went out of her way and made a decision to keep a long time HP customer happy by honoring the email and I am singing their praises. WAY TO GO HP!!

**I thought you folks at consumerist would appreciate a nice story like this. HP did a wonderful job!**

If there was a Consumerist version of Monopoly, a card about a situation like this would be our version of “Bank Error In Your Favor, Collect $200.”

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