I’m a very disappointed owner of a compaq V6000 series laptop that came with a AMD processor. I was happy thinking that i’d saved a few thousands buying this piece with the same config with intel processor costing atleast 5k more...(still i’d paid about 41 K)...
Everytihng was fine till about a year after the purchase, except for the battery which would last for just about half an hour...so leave alone taking it on travel, I couldn’t even use it outside my room without connecting to a power source...
Problems began just after the warranty period ended (my bad luck?). the piece just stopped working one fine day...i took it to the dealer and the first thing he said is that this is a common problem with this series and the repairs may not last long even if its rectified...(the problem with some compatibility issue with NVidea stuff and the AMD board!)...i said i’ll try and got it repaired for a hefty 4.5 K!!...btw, I also had a minor problem before that, the wireless lan had stopped working and this was also fixed in this bill....
One month later the same problem reappeared! I asked them again to repair it and they promptly said that the warranty on the repaired stuff is valid for another month only and i’d have to pay another 5K again after that....as you’ve guessed now, I have decided not to spend even a penny more on this piece of sh*t ( instead bought a nice acer netbook for 22k (have taken extended warranty for 3 years!!). this little beauty lasts for 7 hours without any problem :-) as promised...)
I asked the dealer if compaq knew that a problem exists in the particular series of products, shouldn’t they be recalled and replaced free of cost to the customer? and the reply was that ’sir, it happens only in western countries. here, they don’t bother to even solve a problem unless a customer goes to consumer courts or other legal ways...and as you know our laws don’t even consider these as serious breach of trust or whatever the jargon may be....and may not even award the consumer any compensation because according to the warranty, the product has worked for one year and after that if it doesn’t (whatever the cause) its not the company’s fault....!
And I tried to find out the cost of AMC renewal, and the answer was that it was about 5.5 k and I would have to keep it for 2 - 3 weeks every time it went for repair...so this piece of junk would be in ther service center for half the year even if I continued with AMCs, as the repair of this piece doesn’t usually last longer than a month. I wish I knew about HP/Compaq’s product quality and their attitude/policies towards indians earlier :-(