Why I will Never Buy HP again!
I’m sorry HP, but I will never again buy a product from you. Ever!
Now I am sure that someone, somewhere will ask the obvious question… why?
Well I can understand a business needs to make a profit, but I am sick to death of your ridiculously short time to obsolescence for all of your hardware products.
I bought a laptop about 2 years go from you. I needed one on short notice, and yours seemed a good ballence of price and performance. Not to mention I have a fetish for blue LED indicators and yours had plenty. I knew I would be upgrading to Vista and yours had a ‘Vista Ready’ sticker on it (remember when those were all the rage?) and a 64 bit Athlon processor in it. So I thought ‘Outstanding, this will be perfect for work!’. I bought it, and a couple of weeks later bought a copy of Vista Ultimate to install. I whipped out that 64 bit version DVD and installed it. No problems, it installed, and booted up. No sound, but hey, I need to grab the drivers. I check your support site, and no-dice. Okay, its only been a couple of months, I can suffer with 32 bit for a month or two until the drivers are out. That was two years ago, and even today, over 2 years after Vista hit the open market, there are still no 64 bit drivers for the audio components on that laptop. I’m sorry, but that kinda tells me that it wasn’t Vista ready folks, sorry to burst your bubble. The cooling fan began to make a horrendous noise recently, so I finally gave up on it, and purchased a laptop from one of your competitors, that came with a 64 bit processor AND a 64 bit OS that has all the drivers it needs.
About the same time I bought the laptop, I purchased one of your OfficeJet business printers. I am a tele-commuting programmer and the $25 home printer was just not holding up well to some of my printing needs. This printer served me well, it was attached for quite a while to a computer with XP on it, simply because thats what the desktop had on it. I recently moved it to a wireless print server, and started to install drivers, and guess what I found? Again, no drivers for Vista. Why, after over 2 years, do you still not have a “full featured” printer driver for Vista available for my OfficeJet printer? For that matter, Vista was out to companies like you to be able to develop and test drivers even before it was out to the general public. So we’re talking at least 6 months longer. It’s not like I bought the $29 printer from Walmart, I went out an purchased a business class printer, one that can stand up to the punishment I put it through yet you refuse to support it? You’re still selling me ink cartridges at about $60 a pop for a full set. So it’s not like you’ve told the world that particular model is dead. Why can’t I get a driver set that works flawlessly with Vista, rather than having to deal with the cut down basic printing services that I get natively? Its not like you haven’t had time to get the drivers put together.
Furthermore, I have a cheap ($40) photo printer I bought a while back as well, made by one of your competators, and guess what? It has drivers, and 64 bit ones at that for Vista. Seems like they want my business alot more than you do, they provide a lower cost, higher quality product, and they damn well stand behind it.
Now I’m sure that I am going to hear the “But you’re an early adopter…” refrain from the chorus. Sorry folks, but after over 2 years….its not longer early adoption. 64 bit is here, and it’s here to stay. Any company that refuses to provide support to the x64 crowd is going to go under, or at least it will never get my business again.
Sorry HP, despite your advertisements, there is nothing personal about your support of your customers. But for me, your lack of support is personal, and I refuse to put up with it any more. Good-bye.