High-tech grudgefight HP vs DSG
After my complete nightmare trying to order an XPS 1730 gaming laptop from Dell, I cancelled the order and instead went for the most powerful machine that my local PC World sold - a HP DV7.
One of the issues with machines these days is that they no longer ship with install media, instead they contain a recovery partition that typically allows you to boot into it to factory restore a machine or create restore DVD should you wish to delete the restore partition or give yourself added resiliency.
Here lies the problem, what if the machine is shipped with the restore partition corrupted? This is excacly what I found after spending over a grand-and-a-half on the laptop. Any attempt to cut the restore DVDs or boot into the restore paron resulted in an Error 100A.
As the laptop is a couple of weeks old I contacted HP Total Care who, after a bit of an email back-and-forth, acknowledged the restore partition was corrupted and that I would get restore DVDs free of charge - great, top customer service. However the department I emailed couldn’t supply them and they would forward my details onto the department that could.
Then things went quiet…..for two weeks. I decided to ring the HP Total Care team who first tried to get me to buy the DVDs from their Best2Serve website. I pointed out that it was not like I have wiped out the restore partition and not made any restore DVDs - the partition was corrupted when I received the mahine. They acknowledged this and agreed to ship the DVDs to me free of charge - until they found out that I had brought the machine from the Dixon’s Group.
Apparently the Dixon’s Group, which includes those bastians of extreme cluelessness Dixons, Currys and PC World, have struck and agreement with HP that they will provide first line support - thank god I didn’t have a serious problem. So I hung up on the HP Total Care South Africa call-centre and called PC World….how then told me restore DVDs were the responsibility of HP….who I ran up and they told me they couldn’t supply them and to ring HP back. I asked for a copy of the HP policy statement and I then rang HP back up. So back-and-forth-back-and-forth.
In the end I stumped up the 25 quid and ordered the DVDs, not exactly top notch customer service.
