[…] Parcelforce texted the delivery slot. No delivery. Parcelforce and HP’s tracking systems then claimed I had refused the parcel. I scheduled a redelivery for the next day. Parcelforce then rang me and the agent acknowledged a delivery had not been attempted and that the tracking information was false. It claimed HP had requested that the parcel be returned to sender.
Wanna talk about it (seriously)?
They have awful support. They build machines that are prone to overheating, their servers are second to Dell (who have considerably better support), there’s a lot about HP not to appreciate.
As a friend of sysadmins I hear horror stories of HP server racks and I hear most shops running with Dell enterprise plans both for laptops and servers.
Their stuff also seemed so cheap and non-robust :(
I have my share of issues with Dells, but the last HP machine I had killed itself through fan failure and overheating.
My Dells tend to break to wear and tear from me being not so gentle with them - I think I’ve had two Dells that had hinge issues, but that’s not as major as an overheating problem.
I’m one such sysadmin. I have to work with HP products and HP-by-another-name L3 switches. They are not exaggerating. We’ve had brand new server power supplies crap out on the first power-up. Intermittent outages are a weekly event. Sometimes HP devices refuse to talk to the network because we looked at them wrong. I’m hoping to finally move all of our services to a Dell server over the winter. Then the HPs will be sacrificed to the old gods.
Got a pair of old HPE gen8 1U servers that are chewing through fan packages like nobody’s business, replaced at least five burnt-out fans on them in a similar amount of years.
We’re running a mix of HPE, Dell, and Fujitsu servers and they all absolutely suck in their individual ways - HP(E) adds a bunch of arbitrary hardware limitations which we have to work around, Dell intentionally degrades our multi-system setups with firmware updates, and Fujitsu’s boot firmware goes absolutely pants-on-head retarded if you’re doing netboot first.
We’ve gotten some Supermicro systems now as well, and they’ve been a real treat in comparison, though their software UX feels like it’s about two decades behind.
I’d stay away from their storage solutions and network gear as well. They are trash.
One of my friends bought a RAM module directly from HP for his HP laptop. The module was identical to the one that came with the laptop, and the specs for the laptop said that it could support even more RAM than he installed (I forget the amount—this was 15 years ago). The computer recognized the RAM and everything worked great… for a couple hours, at which point it would slow down or freeze. I took a look at the laptop and noticed that it was running way hot. I took out the new RAM module, and everything went back to normal.
We then purchased two brand new, identical modules, with identical specs to the HP modules, and installed them in the computer. Same issue—everything worked great for a couple hours, and then it would lock up. I took out just one of the new modules, and the freezing problem stopped.
We contacted HP to ask if this was a known issue, and the answer was basically “yep, that happens. Try removing one stick of RAM.”
So yeah, that’s when I committed to never purchasing an HP product, and steering my family and friends away from them.
Yeah I had similar issues. My old laptop (back venue I swore off HP, and one of the contributing reasons) had an issue where if you loaded an app and it needed memory that spanned both RAM chips… it would power cycle. Most users at the time reported the issue using Photoshop at the time so HP released a patch… that fixed it for Photoshop.
The actual issue lay in the Northbridge of he laptop and was a defect. HP refused to refund the laptop even though it was fairly early within the warranty period. Best I could do was run with one - slightly larger - stick of RAM than what the thing shipped with.
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I was working on one of my users desktops (adding RAM). The machine wasn’t recognizing all of it. I eventually cave and call tech support. Their solution was to not use all of the RAM slots. I called up the next day and got a competent person to replace the board, but pretty much all calls were like that.
we used to do some warranty work for hp. more often than not, the part waiting for us was the wrong one.