Unless HP products came with the winning lottery numbers in them, I would consider such a purchase a waste of time and money. My laptop is in the shop to have the video chip re-soldered. The factory version of this process was a chronic failure. Though it failed after only nine months of periodic use, the One Year Warranty was of no use, as the clock on that warranty starts at the date of Manufacture, NOT the date of purchase. When it became apparent that the chronic video chip failures, endemic in the dv9000 series, were widespread, HP quietly extended the warranty to anyone clever enough to call. Though they had my email address, they did not inform me of the extension. I found out by accident and found that I had missed the extension by two weeks. They refused to honor the extension on my $1100 laptop. When I asked the high-ranking customer service agent (who was very surprised that I was able to get so high up in their service hierarchy) why they did not contact me about the extension, he told me that they were afraid that so many people would preemptively fix the problem that was so prevalent it warranted an extension, that they decided to keep it quiet. And they call that customer service. And the famous “left hinge” meltdown, also chronic in that model series, hasn’t occurred on my machine yet since it never ran long enough (one year) for that problem to reveal itself. HP wanted $450 to fix the problem. I’m having it repaired locally for $250
I have an HP Desktop as well, which also failed within the first year and again, no warranty coverage for the same reason. The retailer (Circuit City) told me that they too had had the same experience and runaround with an item from HP that they used in the store. They had to go to a VP to get their six month old PC repaired. I just rebuilt mine with new parts and called it an experience.
Stardock is awesome. HP is not. Two IT companies that I work with have dropped HP from their line-up because their own reputation depends on solid product and HP misses the mark by a mile.
