Marc thought he was being practical when be purchased a four-year warranty to go along with his HP desktop. After about a year, the computer failed. No problem. Just send the tower in for some of that stellar HP repair service. Except there’s probably a reason why you rarely hear the words “stellar,” “HP,” and “repair” in the same sentence.

He writes:

I purchased an HP a little over a year ago, and decided to go ahead and get the more advanced 4 year warranty (was spending enough on the PC, decided to go ahead.)

Awhile ago the PC would no longer boot, no bios screen or anything. After confirming it wasn’t a basic issue like a power supply going out, it was decided it appeared to be the motherboard. Called HP, they had no record of my warranty. Faxed them the information I was asked to (and told it could not be emailed, that it had to be faxed, and that I couldn’t simply give them the information over the phone.) This went back and forth for multiple days, with faxes being sent, being told that wasn’t the right information, and then finally their ‘executive’ service was called. They input the information in a few minutes and a box arrived a few days later.

A week later my PC came back. Screws were missing from the case, at least one expansion card wasn’t plugged in at all and was just rattling around in the case, and the wrong disk image had been loaded on the hard drive. Since I backup all my own material that specific one wasn’t an issue, and HP’s executive service told me and a friend, both relatively competent computer users who fix other peoples PCs that we could fix the problems ourselves if we wanted or they could send a box tomorrow. The list of fixes/changes made to the computer confirmed the motherboard was bad, and was replaced. The sheet also said my 750 gig hard drive was replaced with a new 750 gig… but my PC came with a 1 TB drive… and was returned with a 1 TB drive.

After choosing to make the small fixes ourselves, and reloading my personal disk image, everything seemed to work for a week or two. Then the exact problem again, wouldn’t boot. Called them again, box came again, sent it off.

Earlier today, the PC arrived again. Once again, screws missing. PC won’t boot, but the BIOS screen does appear, and we do start to get the Windows boot screen, then it turns black. Trying this multiple times (and changing boot settings in the BIOS that their tech seemingly setup improperly) led us to getting a mouse arrow once, and black screens every other time (and the one time the mouse arrow appeared was after sitting around for more than five minutes.) It should also be mentioned that despite having the same problem, the motherboard wasn’t replaced this time (after the problems last time, went ahead and marked it with a marker. )Hardware was also plugged into the wrong ports causing issues, which we redid which didn’t seem to fix anything.

There were odd dust balls in the computer case, and some sort of residue on the outside.

And because that wasn’t enough, instead of sending the sheet explaining what they fixed and what was done, they sent… instructions on setting up antivirus programs for Windows XP (copy-written circa 2004 by HP.)

HP has been called once again, and we are expecting a return call tomorrow, but since this will now be the third time this machine has been sent in in effectively 2 or 3 weeks, not much is expected.

We can understand his your bar might be low for HP’s service at this point. It’s probably time to launch an EECB, or cross his fingers and hope for a competent tech this time.

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