
I am amazed by the lack of attention by HP to repairs. To be honest, this complete experience is insulting. Either my laptop is cursed or HP will go bankrupt within a year. I can not inmagine any company can stay in business if you mess up this bad on this scale.
I really love my 2133, but it had a small issue with the speaker grill falling off, a known issue with this particular model. Contradictory to common sense and any economics I know, replacing this glue-on grill requires the replacement of the entire screen. Even when I explicitly asked to send me a grill or tape, they insisted that the only way to replace the $0.10 grill was by replacing the $300 screen, which takes a technician about 2 hours. It was all covered under warrenty, so I did not need to worry about the costs. You can always depend on bureaucracy to turn something simple into something big.
I waived this operation because it would mean that I couldn't take my netbook with me in a periiod with a lot of travelling. Just before the MVP summit, my 2133 completely broke down with a dead motherboard. Quite unfortunate, but life has its little challenges now and then. Since it was going for repairs anyway, I had the HP service employee add the action of replacing the grill to the list as well. When replacing the complete inside of thelaptop, replacing the screen is a small action. It was a pretty easy to spot problem, but when shipping it I added a large note on top stating the two issues.
When it returned, the motherboard was replaced, but the speaker grill wasn't. So there was a 50% successrate on this repair. At least the device worked again. On the other hand, it would really be idiotic if they hadn't fixed the extremely hard to overlook problem of a defective motherboard. So I called the helpdesk again. Fixing only half the issues isn't a good way of doing business, especially for a company with a good reputation like HP. The person on the other side was quite helpful and understood I did not want to ship my laptop back again. She agreed to send along a repairman which would fix it on the spot. This is the point where it all went wrong.
The first repairman came 3 days after the call. After completely taking the laptop apart, taking about two hours, he discovered that he missed one cable the original screen did have. The man in question assumed that it was the camera, confirmed with my wife that the camera wasn't important, put the entire laptop together again and left. Unfortunatly it wasn't the cable of the camera that was missing, it was the cable that made the difference between the inexpensive WSVGA (1024x600) and the much more expensive WXGA (1280x756) screen. So I got stuck with a pretty low-resolution screen, trying to work with Visio.
Luckily, HP repairmen number two came a couple of days later with a large box that contained a WXGA screen with a camera. Unfortunatly, it was an used screen that had a large crack in the middle. The best I can say is that he discovered it before he took the laptop apart. He had to order a new screen, and then some colleague would replace it.
A week later, repairman number three arrived. He took the laptop apart completely, without any manual and without any experience with this specific model. I guess when you seen one laptop, you've seen them all. He replaced the screen and put it all back together again. Two hours of work. When I noticed that I couldn't enter my ExpressCard dummy, he quickly discovered that a screw wasn't inserted completely. When he corrected this, the screw came out on the other side of the laptop, through the plastic. He switched somescrews apperantly. The man even dared to sugges to send the laptop to repairs in Poland again, because it now was the fourth time it was repaired. So I ended up with a good screen and a hole in my laptop. Funny what you consider progress sometimes.
Yet another week later, the fourth repairman arrives. Before he came in, he already started an apology: because he didn't have any spare parts with him. An intern has dumped the spare parts in a recycle bin the night before. They have to order new spare parts again to perform this repair. Sometimes I wonder why people even show up on my doorstep.
A couple of days later, repairman number five arrives. Fully equiped with a new set ofscrews and a laptop cover. Upon request, he checked every screw in the laptop. It turns out he switched about 8 screws, some vital like the CPU cooling. After a bit bigger operation then anticipated, I finally get a working laptop.
To be honest, I am extremely disspointed by HP. They needed 6 tries to replace a simple $0.10 grill. It took me and my wife 5 days where somebody had to stay at home to let some HP repairman in. The level of incompetence involved in this story is so big, I can not inmagine that these people do better on other devices. Not a single word from HP as apology for this catastrophy they call a repairservice.
Posted on Friday 03 of April, 2009 [14:21:54 UTC]