Hewlette-Packard Customer Service Review

My aim for this article is to inform readers about HP's customer service. I hope it helps for anyone considering a purchase of a HP or Compaq computer.

The back story: August 25th I ordered a HP: Compaq Presario CQ50 laptop computer. I surprised myself even, I only use Apple. For reasons I won't get into I felt saucy enough to buy a PC. Now, my order goes through, early morning Aug 25 and I receive an email with a promise the computer will be built by September 5th. I figure, hell it's a ways off but I'm a patient guy. I awake on the 26th to an email that says my order has been built and moved to the warehouse for shipping, but the estimated shipdate is still Sept 5. Fine. Labor day rolls around and I recieve another email packed with good news: my order has shipped and well before the estimated date. The other news, estimated arrival date is two weeks out. Fine. Two days later the computer has made its way from China through Palin's Alaskan tundra down through Canada into my hot little hands by the pool. Exciting.

The real story: After a week of Vista Basic (important to remember) fun, my brother installed Microsoft Office 2007 on my new machine. Normally this is a good thing, but in this case all hell was about to break loose. Upon trying to use Office '07 I noticed the program didn't exist anywhere on the computer, but the hard drive space was missing. Odd? I thought so too. So I went to Control Panel to see if Office '07 might be hiding there, nope. In an effort to restore my hard drive space I performed a System Restore to get the computer back to its factory settings. This didn't help either. Not being all too tech savvy I enlisted the free help of HP Customer Service via chat session (since their spoken English isn't something I wanted to deal with). My first encounter with Tech Support seemed innocent and helpful enough...wrong. I relayed my problem to "Daryl" and he had me perform a myriad of tasks before instructing me to create a recovery disc which would solve all my problems, supposedly. I did as I was told and holy crap did I end up regretting it. I ran the restore disc which consists of two steps. One: the hard drive is wiped clean...empty. Two: The recovery files are written back onto the hard drive so the user can start over from day one. I thought this move was a tad extreme, but nonetheless I followed along. The first step ran perfectly, my hard drive content was no more. However, upon entering into the second step, everything fails, quits, shuts off and displays an error message. Great, so now I've got an even bigger problem, I have no operating system as opposed to one that was just missing hard drive space. The next day I got online with my MacBook and chatted with HP Support once more to help rectify the problem. This chat session was with a very obviously American fellow named "Albert." Al also had me perform a wide-range of tasks with my week-old crippled PC. When everything we tried failed I put my foot down. There was a time, just a few short years ago when computer companies included factory recovery discs with the computers they sold. This is no longer the case. Now the end user must purchase these discs if they wish to restore the computer to its true original state. Naturally, I wouldn't have this. How can a company sell me recovery discs to a problem they created? So I told me them politely, but firmly, I want those discs and I'd be damned if they were going to charge me. Thankfully, they agreed with me. If they hadn't I don't quite know where I'd be. Actually, I chatted with two different people from whom I demanded the discs. Again, I was told the discs would ship in 5 to 7 days. They arrived in 2. Bully for me! One of these discs was the right one, the other...wrong. One disc contained Vista Basic, the low end OS which came with my PC originally. The other disc contained Vista Premium...the sexy bigger brother OS to Basic. "Interesting," is what I thought to myself. Interesting because I was in no way entitled to an upgrade. Now, the million dollar question is, was this an accident and I got a lucky free upgrade or was it an intentional gift as a way to apologize for the foul ups? I'll never know but what I do know is the tech support guys practiced infinite patience with my goofy ways and did try to help a lot and everything showed up at my house way before the anticipated deadline, which is always great.

So, HP tech support and customer service get my vote for "good," even with the unnecessary mistakes they tried hard and a free upgrade is also shutting me up, but as always make up your own mind. As for the computer itself...well you'll just have to read a product review.