I have to admit that I wasn’t paying close attention and one of the choices was “Restore”. In the windows world sometime when it crashes it asks to go back to a “restore point” or things like the way it was on the last good boot and such and I sad yes and it began formatting my drive without any working.
So – I’m REALLY PISSED at HP for having a utility that formats your drive without giving you any warning. So I had to install everything from scratch. They had a partition that had the OS on it to reinstall itself and it took over 2 hours to just get back to the point of the way it was when I bought it. In fact the first attempt at it failed and it actually took 4 hours.
So I had to wait hours because HP had added scripts to install all this CRAP and I decided that for $130 at Walmart I can get a virgin copy of Windows 7 without all the HP crap, and I’m glad I did.
No HP utility that’s going to format my drives. No adware. No HP monitoring utility. Not 30 trial version of Norton Utilities. No Quickbooks trial. No adding their suggested bookmarks, none of that.
I know Windows 7 comes “free” with a laptop but quite frankly it is worth $130 to me to get an OS that doesn’t take me weeks to delete all the extra crap they add in. It’s absolutely clear to me from not just what I saw but the phone call with their tech support that they don’t test their add-on in the real world. You certainly don’t format a drive without telling the user that you’re going to do that. My opinion of HP just dropped dramatically. I used to say, “Get an HP laptop.” Now I think not.
Ever hear about backup important work? A cheap little thumb drive can really come in handy.
Yes – I was backed up. That is the files were backed up. I still had to reinstall all my applications. And there was no manual.
Wow, you bought 2 copies of Windows for your laptop. Microsoft must be thrilled.
Let me quess, Pavilion? Those are the crappy HP’s. I am HP authorized and would never recommend one.
i dont know how you got this problem, but HP laptops are not bad…….also if your internet does not work it is best to turn off the wi-fi by pressing the key and turning it back on
( that most of the times fixes the problem )
– also wasn’t there an option to cancle recovery?
Marc Perkel,
This and the adventures with your cellphones, Church and squirrels seems like the kind of content more suitable to a personal blog.
I’m guess his spell check was on that computer too…
Marc, really. Your an IT professional and you buy off the rack? Seriously? How do you think HP can sell you this crap for, what $499.00. Dude, get a business model and quit this amateur bullshit.
I am an HP ASP and I know they suck.
Bottom line. stay away from Wal-Mart.
Cripes.
Crap, it must have had mine on it as well.
Boy, isn’t open source software the worst? It screwed you over again! Oh man, they better fix all their awful, homework eating bugs or no one is ever gonna take them seriously…
um, wait… oh, this isn’t OSS at all. Gee, I guess the proprietary world isn’t any better — just more expensive, opaque, and impossible to fix yourself.
The HP laptop story is very, very pertinent — thank you Mr. Perkel.
1. Dvorak’s essentially a tech pundit. Laptop stories belong on his property if anything does.
2. Uncensored means that here, the nice thing is we get the data points that you won’t normally hear about on TV news and their advertisers. They are afraid to share any info which would scare away their income sources.
3. Laptops suck in reliability, including Hardware and Software. I have bought two pricey mid to high end consumer laptops in 5 years and both are crapola for the trash bin. They both stopped working due to critical hardware failures. Toshiba and Dell. Never again. Low end cheap laptops for me from here on out.
I got an HP laptop in 2007 and it took, oh … about a half-hour to remove the trialware and some other things. Of course, it didn’t have the oddball Win7 to make things weird. It was originally a WinXP system before HP loaded it with Vista, but at least the system could handle it. Never a BSOD in nearly 3 years of use.
http://tinyurl.com/ye4pmdj
This Win7 book should handle most of your problems.
After years of defending the PC to Mac zealots, I decided to buy a Macbook Pro for the hell of. I already had 2 PC laptops and thought it might be interesting to see what other software and tools was available on the Mac just for variety sake.
I’m a total convert now. No more PCs for me.
#11: I have had 3 Toshibas in the past 10 years, and none of them had problems related to hardware, save for a keyboard chip that went bad in one when some liquid trickled in (which was easily repaired). For me, Tosh’s are built like tanks, provided they are used as desktop replacements. I have no experience treating them as portable units.
Wonder if the PC Decrapifier would help much for those not wanting to spend money for a Windows 7 disc?
I stole enough from the plate to get me an HP Mini 311. I’ll take this over some Dell piece of shit any day.
You didn’t need to buy a new copy. You could have borrowed a disc from someone else or downloaded an image of it. Just make a bootable USB or SD drive. Copy the files from the DVD to the flash drive. Delete /sources/ei.cfg, reboot and voila. I got an error with the online activation, but called the automated telephone system and activated just fine.
HP laptops ranked the least reliable in a survey I saw recently. Asus ranked best.
I asked 1 time for a system with NO OS.
They told me it would cost more..
I asked WHY?
They suggested that ALL the ADDED ‘OTHER’ SOFTWARE Paid to be on the system, and it LOWERED the price…
I suggested what they could DO with the computer.
Any person that BUYS a Laptop, that I personally know, I tell them to BRING IT TO ME FIRST, before they do anything with it.
If its under Warranty.. I LEAVE the Corps software on, but remove ALL the extra CRAP(and save 1/2 the drive space..
AND evaluate the NEED of the CORP software.
If its 1 year old…I DUMP it all
The reason I bought it was specifically to get Win 7 without the HP crap on it. And it was wrth $130 to get Win 7 clean.
You are in IT and didn’t know anyone to borrow a Win7 disk from, install, use your HP Win7 key, returning the disk to your friend, saving $130 and having a clean copy of Win7 installed? You need to get out more.
Remember you don’t own the media, you have a license to use it … the key. How and where you get the media is immaterial.
Most systems today have “monitoring” programs that send your usage of their systems back (without identifying you) to insure that future versions will be more reliable. Unfortunately, these things eat processor cycles like mad — not good if you’re trying to play Flight Simulator.
Once signed up, it’s nearly impossible to opt out of the things and get the computer running clean and fast.
Ubuntu
Um, Installing a new OS? With windows that normally means you need to download drivers unless you have them on disk or at least it did on XP?
Of course I’ve seen some evidence that even XP would grab files already on a system on occasion though the occasion was a virus in another sector after I reformatted the main sector and installed a clean OS.
With Ubuntu things are much easier or more or less impossible for the average user. I got it up and running on a old as it came from the factory HP with no major problems. I did a test run of Ubuntu on this rig and no video. High end video card to drive a very high end monitor = no video.
In general I like HP hardware. I think they use trained monkeys to write the software or something.
Got a question. I have an all in one hp at work that won’t print because it says it has no paper. It does. It seems to be a sensor failure. Am I going to be stuck with getting a new machine?
This is why I have always built my own desktops and only bought IBM, now Lenovo, laptops.
Are you sure it wasn’t Global Warming?
Mark. How about providing us with some real posts. I agree with Reader (post 7#). This is turning into an I love Mark Perkel Personal Blog.
I’d rather not see it thanks.
How about some real stories, such as the other good contributors give us? Your posts are boring with a capital B.
#27 Good luck with that. We are authorized on those too but refuse to sell them. Lenovo quality is junk anymore. When you need it fixed you can call me if you don’t throw it out the window first.
I quite like some of the HP notebooks, and they seem to work well providing you spend hours removing the shitware they come with and sell them on after 18 months when the power supply is about to die.
I’ve had numerous pavilions (mainly DV1000s and DV9000s) that just suddenly decided to not turn on, and the repair bill for them was almost as much as buying a new and up to date machine.
Toshibas are if anything, worse than HP as far as the crap toshiba loads on them goes. WHY THE FUCK does toshiba install so many things that just replicate functions that windows already take control of? What the hell is the point of them all, when all they do is slow the machine to about 50% of its capability and add MINUTES to the boot time!
Should have just executed the special command that makes the slipstreamed install image. Now you have an image for your computer with all the drivers installed and no crap ware.