As noted in my last post, my HP Presario V3000 laptop needs a new motherboard. HP Customer Service has agreed to pay for the computer to be returned and repaired at no cost to me. (The only ray of sunshine here.)

Five days ago I was told the packaging materials for returning the laptop would be sent to me within 2 days. After two ineffective phone calls – the most recent of which happened this morning – I’ve learned the packaging materials still have not yet been sent out. Both agents promised to take care of it.

I don’t have tons of money laying around, so my laptop is my primary computer. This means I need it to operate my consulting and web development business. But right now it’s just sitting there while I try to get by with a 6 year old laptop that isn’t capable of running most of the stuff I need.

Worse, I did some searching around and discovered that there are hundreds of stories far worse than mine that clearly illustrate HP’s criminal approach to customer service. There are some true horror stories out there.

Based on what I’ve read, I’m beginning to wonder how wise it would be to send in the laptop at all:

1. Even escalating and complaining to a manager doesn’t seem to do much for you.
2. It could take months, regardless of the time promises of HP agents.
3. Even if it’s repaired, many repairs appear to be temporary.
4. The laptop may come back in pieces.
5. I’m not sure I want to put myself through such a frustrating experience.

It also makes me nervous that I wasn’t told that my hard drive would be wiped until I asked specifically about that. A friend of mine tipped me off about the likelihood of losing everything, so I made sure to check during one of my calls to find out where my return shipping box was. I asked the agent, who could not tell me any useful information about the status of my return shipping package, whether my drive would be wiped.

“Oh, yes. We must wipe the drive to ensure there are no conflicts with the new motherboard,” she said.

I said, “Do you realize that you’re the first agent to tell me of this, and that if I hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t know until my computer arrived here with a blank disk?”

“Oh, I’m very sorry sir.”

“Look, it’s not your fault, but I think it’s important that you tell someone at HP how critical this kind of information is to make sure you don’t cause someone to lose their data.”

“Yes sir, I apologize.”

The agent was friendly enough, and was clearly unhappy to hear that I’d been misinformed. But I doubt anything will become of it.

Of course, knowing what I know, I was naive not to expect they would wipe the drive. But a huge majority of other HP customers would have no idea of the possibility of losing everything on their disk. As for me, I borrowed a friend’s handy universal drive adapter, took out my hard drive, and imaged it for use when I get the laptop back. But I’ll still have to reinstall all the software I had on the laptop, which will take me quite awhile.

So I might go ahead and have HP try to fix the laptop, and simply write it off in my mind. The laptop is worthless to me now, and I have very little confidence that it will be returned in working order. So maybe I’ll just move on. Here are my options as I see them:

• I could buy another basic laptop, possibly a Dell, and get going on rebuilding a system for my work.
• I could build my own PC, which I’ve been contemplating anyway.
• I could switch to Mac, though that would be relatively expensive for a laptop.

I’ll ponder and post an update when I have one. Meanwhile, if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.