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HP Sucks!
If you are not a computer 'otaku' then you might want to stop reading here. You've been warned...
I hate my computer. It is such a piece of crap. I'm writing this update on one of my school's public computers because mine has once again decided to stop booting up. Just last month I had to reformat the hard drive and reinstall all my software and updates because of a similar problem. I think this is now the 3rd time this has happened. Right before coming to Japan, I paid a small fortune for what I thought was a top of the line P4 2.4 Ghz mega-computer. I actually got a discount on it because it had been previously purchased and returned to Best Buy by someone else. It didn't take me long to figure out why this other guy decided to return this piece of junk. The first shocking thing I discovered was that what I thought was a fast highspeed Radeon 3D graphics card with 128 megs of ram was in fact a slow piece of junk with no RAM! I learned after doing some research online (which I should have done before I bought it) that the 128 number is for "shared RAM", or RAM the video card steals from the computer's regular RAM. What kind of B.S. is that? Not a week had gone by since my purchase before one of the arrow keys started giving me trouble. I thought about returning it, but I only had a day or so before I had to leave for Japan and I hadn't begun packing yet, so I let it slide. I have since discovered all sorts of other problems and nuisances that I can't be bothered to go into detail about here. Now I once again have to waste hours of my life trying to solve the mystery of what's wrong with my computer. Hopefully I won't have to reformat my drive again and lose all my valuable data (read: porn). I don't know why my computer keeps breaking down, maybe it just can't handle my moldy apartment... who knows? My advice to the rest of you though is this: NEVER BUY A COMPUTER FROM HEWLETT PACKARD or COMPAQ (same company).
These computers are crap! I don't know what company actually makes good laptops, but I'm convinced from my experience and from what I've read on Internet message boards that HP sucks. In a way, I kind of hope my computer just dies completely. Then I'll have an excuse to buy a new one that can actually play Doom 3 at more than 2 frames per second.
Update: I tried repairing Windows with the disk that came with my computer, but that didn't work. Now I just finished reinstalling Windows. I guess it wasn't a harware problem. I had to install a second copy of Windows on the same partition as the old one, but in a different directory than c:/windows in order to prevent everything in `My Documents` from getting erased. Now I have to try to rescue the files from the old `My Documents` folder, except access to it is now restricted even though I`m the administrator. Then I'll probably have to erase everything and re-reinstall Windows so that I don't have two copies of it on the same partition anymore. What a pain in the ass. My advice to anyone reading this is the following... Never save anything important under 'My Documents'! Create a new directory under C: somewhere and use that for all your stuff.
11 comments
Heya Jamie,Yes compaqs computers are crap, thats for certain. Your problem might be the humidity tho, Ram dosent handle it well and that would be very likely the cause of it not booting. My suggestions are to dry the memorie cards (with a fan or whatever). If its not good enuff, remove the cards and replug them in.
Hope this helps, keep up the good blog, and post most pics from your japanese female students! *rawr*
What? Compaq's are awesome! I still use my multiple re-formatted laptop with a DVD-rom that works sparingly, broken down-arrow key, and dead battery... are Sony Vaio's any good? 
Get a Dell, Sony, or Apple 
I use my Toshiba Tecra (from work) and find it's really good. But what do I know?!?! 8) heheh 
IBM ThinkPad is good!! 
one word....BACK-UP use the yahoo toolbar... a friend had a virus on his computer and it got rid of it! good luck James :) I think this is the longest you have gone without updating, either that, or I am just really bored and keep looking at your site to see if you have updated yet. I'll have to agree with Steph here, Im longing for the promised pics of your female students. 
Yes , HP sucks! They have the worst customer service, they refuse to honor their warrenty on computers still clearly under warrenty and their solution to all computer troubles or issues is to wipe it out and start fresh again. They refuse to look at your system to make a diagnosis and they basically just want you off the phone. Oh, another thing, don't bother asking for their managers, they dont have them. Not one person we spoke to including their QA dept. has a manager. Another crappy company who doesn't care about the consumers who bought their product.The long and short of this story is my 7 month old computer won't boot. It's in a loop. No safe mode, no any mode, it just wont boot. This all happened one lovely day in October 2005 when I decided to start my computer so that I could use it. Crazy, I know, hitting the "on" button can certainly stress out a machine, but I did it anyway. So it starts to boot and them "whamo" it freezes up. Huh, thats weird. So I do what most people do, I hit "ctrl,alt,delete" to get it to reboot. Yah, well that was the beginning and the end of it. It's now stuck in this loop that won't boot in any mode.
We called HP Tech Support. We've spoken to 5 people now. All of them say just wipe it out. That's all the warrenty covers. Nobody wants to look at it to see if they can fix it without losing my data, that's way out of the question. They have no trouble with us taking it to one of their "authorized service centers" - Best Buy - and paying out the nose for them to look at it but they themselves at HP have no interest in the customer, service or holding up their warrenty. They happily offered us the option to buy a warrenty upgrade which we promply asked "Why in gods name would I pay anymore money to you people when you cant honor the warrenty we have now"???
Here's sonmething you guys will love too, the QA guy, Darren, said he didn't even own an HP, he built his own computer. What does that tell you? Their own employees don't buy their crap, So why should we??
Another side note: eMachines has ranked higher in Customer Support in Consumers Reports than HP. eMachines??? Can you believe that?
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