by Tora

Created on: March 15, 2009

I've owned a number of computers over the years, but none have proven themselves so consistently disappointing as the Hewlett-Packard machines I've purchased in the last three years. The first HP notebook I purchased was a dv2000z, customized to order. I bought it in early 2006, and for just under a year it performed admirably enough. It had more than enough memory to run the programs I needed for school, and I even had no problems running online games like Guild Wars and Scions of Fate on it.

Eleven months after I bought it, I began having problems with it. It started off with my notebook's integrated wireless LAN occasionally having issues finding and connecting to my home wireless network. Sometimes rebooting the wireless router would help fix the problem. Sometimes it wouldn't.

Within a week or two, the wireless LAN wasn't showing up in Windows' Device Manager anymore. Thinking it was just a problem with the driver, I reinstalled the operating system and restored the computer to its factory settings. That fixed it, but a few days later, I was having the same problem again.

My system was still under warranty, so I contacted Hewlett-Packard's technical support number. They agreed that it was most likely a hardware failure, and sent me a box and packing materials so I could send it to them for repairs. I never saw that laptop again; months passed with no updates, even though I called their customer service line repeatedly each week trying to find out what had happened to my laptop. About a month and a half after I sent it in, I finally spoke to a case manager, who told me that the problem had been with the motherboard and they were waiting for the part, which was backordered, so they could repair my notebook.

Another month and a half passed before I received a call from a different case manager; the part was still on backorder, so they were sending me a brand new notebook instead. After a bit of negotiating over the specs (they wanted to send me a notebook with an Intel chip; I greatly prefer AMD in my own computers), they made arrangements to ship it to me.

And then my replacement seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. I called to check on the status after two weeks had passed, but none of the representatives I spoke to had any clue what I was talking about. There was no record of a replacement being sent to me. I tried contacting the case manager I'd spoken to, but she never returned my calls. Then, one day, when I was on the phone trying to find out what

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