CONSERVATIVE' Gets a New HP Computer!

Man, I've needed a new Computer for so long now, I could hardly wait to pull it out of the box! My old one got hosed when Norton came out with their new firewall and anti-virus which I desperately needed and which also bogged down my machine to the point I could hardly write or post my pages anymore. My machine had now developed the nasty habit of about ten minutes on the web before the connection would blip into nonexistence. Just great. Just great.

Well I got things set up quickly. Had everything plugged in, went through the setup screens and all, and was ready to make the new one, “home”. I had most of my text files backed up to floppies, and the rest were on CD's and I was eager to start the transfer. What's this? Huh? No, I don't want to format the floppy now, I want to transfer what's on it, my files. I pop it out and put it back in. Okay, just one of those computer “things”. I put in another. No, I don't want to format that one either. I try again with the same thing showing up. I try them on my old computer and they work just fine. Hmmmm…….I try more with a number of the floppies not working.

No problem I figure, I'll contact Hewlett-Packard—after all their site lists their Customer Service as #1! Besides, floppy drives are cheap and can be had for under 20 dollars—how much of a problem could that be to have them replace my defective part?

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. First I of course had tried all the usual fixes such as deleting the drive, rebooting and letting the drivers reinstall. Going into safe mode and making sure only one floppy drive was listed, etc. Of course I told them all that and of course they had me do everything I had already done over again. Then they told me the problem had to be my floppies were bad. Of course I told them they all worked on my old computer just not this new one. For some reason this message didn't to reach their ears. They tell me my floppy drive is fine.

Now most of this discussion was by HP's “Instant Support” done with a slow version of their own instant messaging. I'd post what we said to one another but the tab that is supposed to archive your messages never got the messages. (That whole program stopped working months ago!) Alright, I'll do a test then. I sent them the below results.

Dear HP;

I took 23 floppies and tried to read them in the floppy drive.

First pass I had only 4 disks that said they needed formatting and the remaining 18 could be read.

I then took the 18 that were readable and tried them again. 7 of them could not be read on the second pass leaving 11 readable disks out of the original 23.

I then took the eleven readable disks and tried it again. This pass left 4 that could not be read and said they needed to be formatted first. This leaves 8 readable disks out of 23.

Next pass only 2 didn't work, leaving 6.

Next pass 3 didn't work. This leaves 3 floppies I guess that must be ok and there is no problem with the disk drive according to your support.

20 floppies that suddenly just went bad. Must be the disk drive then that is ruining them since they worked in it before. Understand the problem yet or do you need further illustration?

These were 23 floppies that worked first pass every time on my other PC. And you tell me the drive works just great.

Next I tried the phone route. Same runaround until one the foreign technician on the other end just hangs up on me I guess because he didn't know the answer. I immediately called back I was so angry! Suddenly I was mysteriously redirected on my call-back to an American technician that worked with me for several hours on the problem and really, really tried to help me. We got the problem solved and some others because of him. He knew what he was doing and got other help when he didn't. That is the way customer support used to be when I first got into computing. Hats off to that guy. Maybe HP isn't so bad after all??? Hey, I am getting a new drive after all this trouble!

I just thought I should give them some credit after that. But why did that Indian guy hang up on me when he got stumped? All those frustrating hours on a new machine with foreign support that don't know what they're doing. Maybe they should bring customer support back home? This kind of “help” doesn't create a good customer base does it, so are they really saving all that money?