bought the wife an HP laptop 2 yrs ago.
Bought the extended warranty with it, same time, same charge slip

lately the led back-light is "twitching". light dark light dark etc.

so last night I called tech support.
"i'm sorry sir your laptop is out of warranty" ( how does one type an Indian accent?)

No that's why I bought the extended warranty.
" oh no sir you have not activated the warranty, you will need to call back tomorrow to activate the warranty, I can not access the system now" WTF???????

OK so buying it on the same slip apparently doesn't qualify...

call back tonight to activate warranty,
every 15 seconds they tell you how busy they are and how glad they are that you called them ( like a have an F'ing chioce)
finally after whacking around for 15 minutes, it's now registered.
I get transferred to tech support

so i go through explaining that the screen is flickering all over again...

when i get "i'm sorry sir your laptop is out of warranty"

"oh you will need to call back tomorrow after the system has registered as it can take up to 24 hours..."


gee why don't we do this every night for the next month and then it will be out of warranty???? F'ing idjits.

No wonder HP wanted to get out of the PC business, they suck at it.

 

Does not sound like fun......customer "service."

 

That sucks. HP is one of the mfg'r both I and my son refuse to use based on our past experiences.

 

I spent 3 hours on the phone with HP customer service over two days back in November. They advertised a certain speed processor on a lap top I had purchased. The lap top came with something else. They wanted to charge me an additional $80 to exchange the lap top for one with the processor that I was supposed to have received in the first place. I finally had to send it back and then reorder it to get what I should have received in the first place.

 

HP customer service is the worst. I have had many frustrating conversations with "Christian" (said with an Indian accent) or "Haley". Very frustrating - would not buy a HP again.

 

I have not owned an HP product since my Deskjet 500 that I bought back in 1991.

With that said: I am not a fan of "Extended Warranties of service plans except for ONE type. That is a contract for HVAC service that usually includes a PM per year (which pretty much covers the cost of the annual contract).

When we bought our first Garmin C-330 from Best Buy we bought a three year plan. Silly me but in my world that means that the product should be covered for three full years. Not once within a three year period. And if that is the case it should cover a replacement product based on the purchase price that you originally paid for not the technology equivalent as every one knows that technology gets less expensive but the contract that you bought was based on the "early adapter" price not what that model would sell for two years down the road. IHMO, they are a rip off.

Going back to the HVAC service plan. Living in the Washington DC Metro area we can have some brutal summers. I have posted this lesson learned from some friends of ours back in the 90's when we had a brutal July with several days with temperatures over 100*F and the rest of the month was with temps over 90*F. Their AC unit went out and they could not get anyone out to look at it until after the heat wave was over because everyone they called told them that they were servicing their "contract customers first". Which is what you would expect them to do. That is the only service contract that we carry. I HATE the heat and cannot tolerate high heat. On the other extreme, we could always heat our home with our Kent (high tech) wood stove in the winter if we had too.

 

You have my sympathy, Jerry. I had to call HP many times for my laptop, too. Had the screen replaced because it was dim, had to send it in again because the wifi quit working, had to put Windows 7 on it when Vista updates crashed it. PITA dealing with them. My screen started dimming again and since it's about 5 years old now, I just bought a Lenovo, while it was on sale at Costco. Don't really need it yet, since I'm not traveling but I don't want to deal with HP again.

 

My HP printer wouldn't work when I got a new computer with Windows 7 on it. I downloaded a driver that was supposed to do the trick. NOT. The local computer geek couldn't fix it. The guy at Dell customer service gave up. I finally got a guy from HP on the phone. (start Indian accent here): "Yessir, I will most definitely fix that problem". Guess what, he did. Turns out the port it was plugged into was the problem and he figured it out.

I'll bet he was fired soon after.

 

What I hated most about HP service was that they insisted on reading their script even though the issue I had wasn't covered by the standard question and answer routine.

 

They all to that. Verizon DSL "customer service" has driven me to the edge a few times reading from a script.