Stay away from HP stuff

"Rudolf"

Full page ad from Optus boasting about their "On -call technical support ".

Shows a monkey sliding down a steel pole.

Hysterical.

......... Phil

"Phil Allison" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@individual.net:

Hahahah!

you're not wrong!

GB

I use HP for everything, never once had a problem.

My current emplorer uses HP for everything, rarely do they have issues. Considering we have around 100 hp servers, several HP sans and I would dare to estimate 1000+ pc's that aint to bad. Add to this the printers we sell to clients are ....... HP....

I guess you picked a bad one. Purchasing one faulty printer is hardly good advice to avoid using the manufacturer.

No - But piss-poor support is :(

That is just simply not possible. Their software is junk, just as the OP said. It always has been, nothing new there.

Let me guess, you have a corporate account with them. I'm also going to bet that you don't have to call India for support. 1000 pcs and 100 servers w/absolutely no problems. Right.

I have spent scores (probably hundreds) of hours fighting HP crapware since the early 90's. The support now is really the worst, they will disconnect you and then send an e-mail explaining how "technical problems" interrupted the session. This happens just as soon as their scripts run out of canned responses for them.

As for the hardware quality, I saw a brand new 4100 (>$1000 US) print one page then die of high-voltage failure. I suggest that you need to setup one of the wonderful new 7310 Officejet (>$400 US) in a shared scanning environment if you really need to see for yourself just how bad it really can be. Perhaps you didn't know that HP censors posts from their forum that mention things like this. BTW, the 7310 problems are very well known, yet HP still keeps selling them and their is no fix in sight until the next M$ OS comes out. Do you think that is reasonable? Didn't you ever wonder why they have two sets of driver downloads for the mid-range printers?

Don't get me wrong, not everything they have is junk. Just all of their home equipment and half of the "professional" stuff.

I have a heap of HP stuff too (at the moment 2 PCs,a camera, 2 Printers, a scanner and probably other things I have forgotten). I must agree their online tech support since it went to India has been a bit hit and miss and varies from excellent to hopeless depending on who you get to. I had one person that was really good, knowledgeable and helpful while another women grasp of English was so bad she was incomprehensible (and several others whose Indian-English while understandable after some interpretation, had me in fits).

The last time on board sound died on the mother board of a new Pavilion I was told numerous times to do the same thing (re-install the drivers) by numerous online support staff even though I told them I had already done that 101 times. I then rang the help number and to my great surprise second time around got a Aussie based here who was very helpful and a AWA technician turned up the next day, confirmed the mobo was faulty and replaced it with a new one (the pain was having to uninstall all the hardware and software I had installed as they required it to be in its virgin as bought state).

However in the case of the first phone call I made, after waiting 90 minutes in the HP call waiting queue on a Saturday morning I was connected to another lady who was calling HP and expected me to help her with her problem ( I was tempted as I thought I could but knowing it would take a while to explain a simple solution to someone who was rudely impatient and apparently somewhat computer illiterate, I selfishly chose to hang up and call again). I was so long in the queue their office hours were over and I expect some techo at HP with a sense of humour just connected all the callers still waiting in the queue to other queuing calls.

My admittedly perhaps somewhat illogical loyalty to HP stems from the 80's when their stuff was excellent if somewhat expensive. I also think their website, in terms of online data sources not necessarily online help staff, is very useful if sometimes a little difficult to navigate; most of what you want is there it is just sometimes a little hard to find.

On balance while HP are not the centre of excellence they were in the 80's still compare favourably in terms of value for money, quality and service, to similar companies such as Dell.

(snip)

That's the standard problem with help desks - they know f-all about the product and barely enough to follow a script. Even the "on-shore" ones I have had the misfortune to need to contact (D-Link, 3Com/USR and Acer) were simply script-jockeys.

(more snip)

Totally agree.

They aren't a shadow of the outfit they were in the 80's.

Interesting you mentioned Dell. I've never held their stuff in any regard, but a mate recently sent me his P2-300 laptop to set up to run some (yes, really) DOS apps under 98SE. Sent the vanilla 98CD too, and said i could blow the lot away and reinstall if necessary. the machine was a mess so I did reinstall. Then started hunting for drivers (video etc etc). Found the Dell website to be an absolute pleasure and full of all the stuff I could want. Far cry from my last search at the HP site for a simple printer driver. Dell1 HP 0.

I'd second that driver issue...

The software couldn't auto detect the network printer, no even given the MAC address. After I hard coded the IP, I had to move the printer to the other side of the office. When I plugged the net cable back into the very same switch, all the system were again unable to detect the printer.

I had to uninstall and reinstall their bloatware, taking some 35 minutes each. Who the hell wants a driver that requires .NET to be installed anyway?

The guy I get my computer gear from was telling me the other day about someone who asked his help sorting out a HP printer or a scanner that wouldn't re-install after they upgraded to WinXP. On contacting HP they were told "we're not going to bother writing new drivers for XP - you'll have to buy a new one", the person concerned did just that - but not from HP!

For some odd reason that story reminds me of HP sauce!

But the manufacturer's attitude is a good reason to avoid their products, it stands to reason that they don't want to upset lucrative corporate clients, but from what I'm increasingly hearing HP's attitude to the average Joe - "we've got your money - now piss off"!

The trick with scanners and win xp is to use the microsoft scanner drivers they actually work quite well. Fine if you have one of the more popular brands or the scanner has a twain interface.

Not problems with old scsi scanners as long as there are win 2000 drivers for the adaptor card.

The hp mac scanner software actually works pretty well the printer software is another story.

Alex

I try to avoid hardware that needs proprietry drivers to work ( like the cheaper HP printers (and many opher brands))

Find me a supplier with better support. I think you will find they are all the same, probably reading the same FAQ that you will find on the website.

That would exlude just about every piece of hardware manufactured these days.

As a HP technician, I can tell you you're just unlucky, perhaps this one was just a lemon. There are thousands out there working flawlessly day in day out. With the most common problem comming from people, as usual, feeding paper with wet liquid paper thru the scanner, and wondering why everything thereafter scanned has black lines down the copy.

If you were in perth, id of been happy to take a look at it for you, outside of business hours, at no cost.

Maybe he still uses a ASR33? ;-)

were

My first computer was the one before the microbee, the one that arrived in kitform.... I remember stealing a transformer and capacitors from my dad's work for the PSU.

Later on my dad scored one of the built microbee's with basic. Twas awesome!

I am in Perth, and I had the misfortune to have a problem with a 5L. The HP people at O.P. sent me to some dodgy ppl in Main St - not where you work(ed) I hope - who tested it and determined it needed a new formatter.

I took it home and cursed it a few times, and it suddenly worked fine again.

Maybe I know magic curses they didn't, but it left me with a distinctly bad impression of the HP support chain. That and faulty inkjet carts which die with

not if you include monitors keyboards mice and disc/disk drives (most of which will function at-least acceptably without special drivers)

I recently saw a announcement that a major player in the wi-fi game had released open source drivers..

printers with ethernet connections are often good too.

Bye. Jasen