The horrible state of (consumer) computer support

When you are known by all your friends to be a geek, they also know when to email you when something goes wrong with their PC. Two weeks ago a friend contacted me when his laptop stopped working. Right in the middle of doing something it just turned off, and would no longer turn on.

The following events show just how horrible the current state of consumer support is:

• The first thing he did was contact the vendor (HP). Their support staff verified the serial number and model number, and said that they’d want $175 just to look at it, and that he’d have to pay for shipping to and from them. The machine was 3 months out of warranty and the company that made it doesn’t want to have anything to do with it without being paid more.
• When he came to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth getting repaired, he took it to the service technicians at Geek Squad (the in-store BestBuy service). For $70 they would remove the laptop drive and attempt to get his data restored. several days later they contacted him with some bad news; all his data was gone, and the drive was empty!

At that point I told him to pop it in a box and ship it to me, because I simply couldn’t believe that a hardware failure could kill the computer AND erase the drive at the same time.

Once I received it, I popped out the drive, hooked it up to my PC and found all his data 100% intact. So what the heck did the Geek Squad do? As it turns out, this HP laptop has not one, but two 80Gb drives inside it, and guess which one the "repair technician" removed? Correct; the second (empty) one. The genius completely missed the "HD1" and "HD2" icons on the bottom of the machine.

I then did a quick search on the symptoms the laptop was showing; and 30 seconds later I came across an HP support page that admitted they were having some major issues with an entire line of their machines, and that they had extended the warranty to 24 months.

It took me 30 minutes to convince the customer service agent that they were indeed responsible for this, and I even had to email her the specific recall page. At the end of the call a returns box was being overnighted to me, and the machine is going in for a free repair.

It’s a sad state of affairs when so much goes wrong.

• HP should have immediately recognized the symptoms as those of their recall, and initiated a return as soon as my buddy called them.
• The Geek Squad should have recognized that this machine has two drives, and removed the correct one. Instead, they gave their customer some bad news and probably sleepless nights, plus they charged $70 for doing nothing.
• When I called HP I should not have had to push hard to convince them that this was a known issue. They did a really good job of hiding the warranty extension page on their site, always listing it at the bottom of massive lists of other errors and simply calling it "Limited Warranty Service Enhancement". It is not listed under any of the pages that try to troubleshoot the machine.

$900 laptops have become disposable items and it’s no wonder companies want their customers to purchase the pricey extended warranty; without it, you are pretty much screwed and will have to push hard just to get the service you deserve. It’s time computer companies start offering 3 year bumper to bumper service.