I own, since December 2006, an HP Pavilion(a1518). I did not take the monitor it came with but added a larger LCD(HP vs17e) thus increasing the price to Rs. 50, 000.
The very first time I used the system(film editing, therefore multimedia and DVD usage is primary) the DVD started stuttering, wouldn’t play forget about burn, but when I tested it with a CD it worked fine. On logging a complaint, was adviced to go online and download a driver from their site. Problems keep persisting, recurring and DVD now functioned but in a limited manner, totally whimsical, it seemed to me. My administrator is too busy with his small business and anyway, he says the company owes me on-site warranty for a year. Great!
I call HP. Their numbers are not easy to get through. I trade, pay my bills, recharge my handphone and work ONLINE. My life freezes if I don’t have a system that works.
The downtime on this system is incredible. Its a record breaker! When you sign the EULA with HP AND MS, they are just kidding about their end of the bargain. Apparently, Microsoft does not gauranty anything directly to the consumer eventhough HP and MS OS are packaged TOGETHER and sold TOGETHER. HP India refused to help. **Yes, refused because its not their responsibility if its not h/w. That’s the caveat to remember when buying HP products. The waranty is ONLY for h/w. They will give you service over the phone which is extremely unpredictable in terms of outcome for any complaint logged.
Their 1 year "on-site warranty" DOES NOT COVER THE PACKAGE OF S/W AND H/W JUST HP H/W COMPONENT. How do you like that? I have been handed a very expensive lemon and I can’t even say "no, thank you".
What happens to Compac users like me who loved the product and the service offered in Africa and Europe based on which I decided to buy HP in India since HP now owns both brands?
My reseller/administrator was incidentally, unaware of this little "waranty does not cover s/w only h/w" gimmick.
*Here’s the solution to getting service out of the HP technicians:
Apparently HP assembles their pre-configured machines by resourcing the hardware components from various sweatshops across Asia. I suspect the cabinet has nothing but slots in it into which one can pop in or pop out any component. Now these components may or maynot work based on how stringently tested they are.
Log in your complaint as a hardware problem by sending an SMS to the number on the sticker on your CPU. They will then call you back within 72 hours. Just send them an SMS, do not call.
They will try to walk you through the problem to try and solve it over the phone. If its a problem you have already dealt with and couldnt solve then, stick to your guns and insist it’s the hardware thats causing it. 9 times out of 10 this will be true. Then, the boys from Redington will come to you to fix it, and trust me, they are definitely humans.
The technician from Redington who dealt with my problem was polite, intelligent and most important - honest enough to tell me that the DVD combo drive was defective to start with, which is why I had problems with it from the date of purchase. He replaced it witha new one.
All of this took about ten minutes from start to finish including signing of service challan. I wondered why I had suffered so much for the past 8 months when all it took was ten minutes of a technicians time to fix the problem. *