When Things Go Wrong

I had a chance to work with two people last week who are having problems with their computers and can’t get any satisfaction from the manufacturer. One of the systems is a Hewlett Packard and the other is a Gateway. These are commonly owned computers so I thought that these people’s problems might be of interest to a lot of you.

Let’s take the Gateway computer first. I had an email from a reader several months ago asking me about processors, hard drives, memory, etc. She was going to have Gateway build a computer to her specs and she wanted my advice as to what components to order. I have always liked the AMD processors and I told her that if it were me, I’d get the fastest AMD available. This was around the time that AMD had just brought out the new Athlon Thunderbird chip. The Thunderbird had a huge advantage over AMD’s older Athlon because the cache was built right on the chip itself.

This allowed it to run at the same speed as the processor (1,000 mhz at the time) instead of having it located on the motherboard and running at the computer’s buss speed. (133 mhz) As you can see, there is a huge difference in these speeds. So, she ordered her system with the Thunderbird processor. She talked to both Gateway’s representative and their service dept. to make sure that she was getting the newer chip.

When she received her computer, she found that they had shipped the older Athlon. NOT what she ordered. That was several months and many phone calls and emails ago. One thing that Gateway does when you email their tech support is to run a log of everything said. Then they send you that log by email. That’s a nice touch. Unfortunately, it didn’t help to get the problem resolved. She is still complaining to Gateway but it doesn’t look like she’s going to get anywhere.

Now for Hewlett Packard’s least expensive computer. This system would have to be included in the ten worst computers category. To start with, it sports a whole megabyte of video memory. That was fine- in 1988. It’s also next to impossible to upgrade the RAM without taking the power supply and hard drive out. I worked on a similar model last year and found that it would only recognize up to 64 megs of ram. (It only had one RAM socket) It couldn’t even read a 128 meg ram chip!

This mess was brought to my attention by a client trying to upgrade to a cable modem. The cable guys said, “This system won’t work.” I thought they were kidding but after working on the system myself, I discovered that they were right. Several calls to Hewlett Packard produced nothing but insults and confusion. One tech said, “Send it back,” (it was still under warranty) and gave us a reference number for returning it, but when we tried to use it, another tech said that we would have to run through another bunch of tests. We had already racked up over two hours of long distance charges. That was enough. My client finally gave up on cable and decided to just use the computer “AS IS” until a better system could be found. (That shouldn’t be hard)

It just goes to show you that even major manufacturers make some pretty bad computers and sometimes fail to stand behind what they sell. There can be a big difference between the top of the line and the bottom.

Reach me at randy@randybenjamin.com.