1y ago

HP says I should have known its £399 laptop bargain was too good to be true

www.theguardian.com HP says I should have known its £399 laptop bargain was too good to be true

Then it grabbed it back mid-delivery and is blaming me

[...] 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.

Hacker News @derp.foo

haxor @derp.foo

BOT

1y ago

HP says I should have known its £399 laptop bargain was too good to be true

www.theguardian.com /money/2023/nov/23/hp-says-i-should-have-known-its-399-laptop-bargain-was-too-good-to-be-true

32 2

59 comments

HP. There’s the mistake.
- Huge Painintheass
  
  Exactly
- Highly Problematic
  
  Yup

I worked with HP once at an internship like 15 years ago...I still avoid them because of the shitty experience.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- I worked at one of their support centers decades ago now, and I'll never buy another product of theirs again.
  I will say though that they did seem to support their enterprise hardware better, but thats not something I'd ever be in the market for anyway.
- That's something. I worked at Dell for a year a long time ago and I can safely say it was the worst job of my life. Hated everything about it. I was jealous of the grounds keepers id see out my windows. Only lasted about 9 months. However, I still think their computers are decent as far as the big computer manufacturers go. I'd buy one today if I needed to. Although looking into manufacturers like system 76 makes me think I'll go that route for my next laptop.
- I mean it’s not like a sane person would pay their own money to buy anything HP.
  Still, I’ve been using HP laptops for 8+ hours a day in the last 5 years due to work, without having a choice.

It's one thing to cancel the order, but it's entirely another to cancel the order while the item is out for delivery. That should never happen. If they let it get out of their warehouse that is their fault.
- And not refund...

a 15in model with 12th gen 1215u, 8gb and 256gb ssd sold last week from multiple u.s. sources (dell direct and hp via walmart) for $250-260 this past week.
399gbp is about 500usd, totally plausible for a 'sale price' on a reasonably-spec'd (such as no discrete gpu) 17in model.

Why is HP still out there doing business is beyond me.
What's even more beyond me is this guy picking HP in the first place.
- [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

The one time I got a prebuilt desktop for myself it was an HP Omen. Terrible decision.
Single unit radiator that struggled to cope with the CPU under any load, custom case so a larger rad AIO won't fit, buy a new case.
Usb controllers overwhelmed while streaming and gaming so bought a controller card. Nope, there is only one slot on the mobo and that's for graphics. (Yes, I should have checked first)
Useless bloatware always crashing and popping up over screen. Changes made to windows registry mean sounds fade in if no sound was played for a while (including alerts or memes on stream so you only hear the last part)
Many regrets.
- HP Omen
  Only tangentially related, but I'm still kind of pissed about HP buying VoodooPC and doing basic fuck-all with it and just slapping the Omen name on stuff once in a while.
  For those who don't remember, VoodooPC used to be a higher end prebuilt gaming computer company. You can go ahead and argue about why prebuilts are trash, not really the point, I don't know if they were at all good computers or worth the cost, but I thought they made some really cool looking computers if nothing else, and occasionally had some pretty cool ideas. The omen was one of their flagship offerings.
  I may be misremembering, it's been like a decade, but I think HP acquired them pretty soon after Dell bought Alienware so it was probably their way of trying to stay competitive. I think by most accounts Dell kind of turned Alienware into shit, but at least they've kept the branding around and still make some cool-looking computers if nothing else.
  
  Yeah, Voodoo back then was super expensive but they were quality at least. High end paint jobs and custom watercooling (in an era when AIO watercoolers didn't exist). Definitely something to lust after.
  Now it's another crappy name slapped onto a crappy HP
- Yeah. I had all of this plus their awful locked BIOS. Ended up cannibalizing the cpu, gpu and ssds into a new case/mobo/psu. Super worth it.
- You could wipe it and restart, remove the bloat from run at startup at least.

I won't buy hp again myself I had a power supply die during covid because they for no reason made it propriety and claimed to not have any because of covid that whole pc ended up in the dump.
Think I tried to get one for about a year before giving up on it. Any normal pc I could have had back working the same day.
- I bought a laptop that came with a broken charger, I could easily test it myself as a friend also had an HP laptop with the same brick (this was before the days of USB C).
  I tried to make a warranty claim and they wanted me to send the laptop too and wipe the HDD, the RMA process would take weeks on top of that.
  I ended up buying a 3rd party charger, I'm sure their RMA process is overly long and convoluted to deter people from making warranty claims
- You could have bought whatever other brand and then buy an adapter for it.
  There are like "dell to hp" adapter or stuff like that

Bullet dodged. Buy something else that is not HP

dell is better
latitude e5470
- Does comparing a corporate machine with a bargain basement consumer system seen reasonable to you? You think Dell is above this type of incompetence? My sweet summer shill.
  They're both shit companies - I sold HP systems for years, and was a brand marketing manager for most of Dell's products at one time or another.
- I just switched from an e5470 to a 5420. I miss i8k, but welcome USB-C (and the faster speed so compiling AUR packages doesn't suck anymore).
  And as someone that used various Dell systems for some time now: The only annoying part is the missing drivers for Linux.

On a separate note, I still don't understand how trackpoints on HP laptops work. There's no scroll button, how the fuck am I supposed to use this piece of shit if I can't scroll??? The thing that is meant to replace the mouse/trackpad for ease of use and ergonomics literally forces me to use a mouse or a trackpad. This doesn't make any fucking sense!!!

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Parcelforce then rang me and the agent acknowledged a delivery had not been attempted and that the tracking information was false.
If you hadn’t attached all the emails from HP and Parcelforce inventing and reinventing the story of your failed delivery, I’d have struggled to believe it.
HP’s terms and conditions state that the contract is formed once the order confirmation is sent.
In 2002 Kodak was forced to honour its contract with more than 2,000 customers after erroneously advertising a £329 camera at £100.
HP’s behaviour sent you on a week-long wild goose chase and unleashed chaos at the Parcelforce depot.
HP ignored my questions about how many customers were affected and why it repeatedly gave you false information.
The original article contains 541 words, the summary contains 120 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
- One of the worst summaries I have seen. The article writing is bad but the summary is missing almost the whole story.
  
  I really wouldn't blame it. Garbage in, garbage out...
  
  This is a truly impressively terrible summary. I mean just the fact that the second word is "then" is something to behold. But then the second paragraph switches perspective without any warning so nobody has any idea who "you" refers to.
  Also, I mean, the fact that it literally cut out everything that happened.
  
  So what did it miss?

I bought a bunch of tablets from them years ago when the price was too good ... The website was crashing... But they shipped... Sold them for a fair price and made a bundle (they were trying to get rid of them)

59 comments