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.

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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

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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.
  
  Their stuff also seemed so cheap and non-robust :(
  
  I have my share of issues with Dells, but the last HP machine I had killed itself through fan failure and overheating.
  My Dells tend to break to wear and tear from me being not so gentle with them - I think I've had two Dells that had hinge issues, but that's not as major as an overheating problem.
  
  I would buy an Acer before I got anywhere near anything by HP. I don't Envy their product people
  
  I see what you did there.
  
  I know acer is pretty shit, but in 2019 I was looking for an all-amd gaming laptop, and there were two whole options in the entire (new) market: one from acer, or one from asus. The Acer had better specs, prices were somewhat similar, so I sat on it. 6mo later, it drops from 2.7k to 1.4k and I jump. I wanted a mobile gaming machine to be similar to my desktop threadripper build. It was decently close.
  Support is shit at L1 but if you get a L2 rep, they actually know wtf you're on about and are very helpful (my display had very visible edge backlight bleed, a second panel too. third was perfect.). I had bought the extended warranty + on-site repair, not trusting depot techs. Shouldn't have been needed, but I wanted the machine, properly.
  Would I do it again? If I had to (if only a couple amd cpu and gpu options exist). The speakers are trash, the screen bezel is literally an inch in all directions, it gulps 300W from the wall when gaming, the system can't run full-bore on the battery (gtav, maxed out, unplug and 45fps becomes ~3 and after a couple seconds becomes hard powered off). There is only 1 NVMe slot while the Intel version has 2 (second is sata m2 for the amd). There was never any gpu driver updates from acer, and the official ones cause screen corruption after waking from sleep, forcing the use of hibernation. But still, it's a desktop 2700, a desktop Vega 56 (though power limited), it's fans could send a man to the moon, it can have 64gb ram, 1nvme, 1 sata m2, and 1 2.5" sata drive, and it's all user accessible. And as a bonus, you can kill someone by clobbering them over the head with it, at like ~8 pounds and ~19 inches diagonal, 1"+ thick.
  So I want to hate it, and I don't love it, but damn it is a beast of a machine, from acer, which up until then I saw as complete dogshit machines. There's at least one person working in their Predator line that actually cares about a good user experience. I won't be recommending them for all but the most edge-cases... but for the edge-cases, it's alright.
  
  Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
  But I get your point
  
  This wasn't even a customized machine though - it was off the (Amazon) shelf, just really high-end for the time. Afaik they didn't offer any variants with more ram or storage. Just Intel or amd, with nVidia or amd. You got more storage with the Intel version, and the second slot as NVMe, but that was it.
  The asus was likely a better built machine, but as being one-or-the-other, specs trumped niceties.
  E: also lol you posted this like 6 times
  
  Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
  But I get your point
  
  Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
  But I get your point
  
  Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
  But I get your point
  
  Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
  But I get your point
  
  Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
  But I get your point
  
  Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
  But I get your point
  
  Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
  But I get your point
  
  I'm one such sysadmin. I have to work with HP products and HP-by-another-name L3 switches. They are not exaggerating. We've had brand new server power supplies crap out on the first power-up. Intermittent outages are a weekly event. Sometimes HP devices refuse to talk to the network because we looked at them wrong. I'm hoping to finally move all of our services to a Dell server over the winter. Then the HPs will be sacrificed to the old gods.
  
  Got a pair of old HPE gen8 1U servers that are chewing through fan packages like nobody's business, replaced at least five burnt-out fans on them in a similar amount of years.
  We're running a mix of HPE, Dell, and Fujitsu servers and they all absolutely suck in their individual ways - HP(E) adds a bunch of arbitrary hardware limitations which we have to work around, Dell intentionally degrades our multi-system setups with firmware updates, and Fujitsu's boot firmware goes absolutely pants-on-head retarded if you're doing netboot first.
  We've gotten some Supermicro systems now as well, and they've been a real treat in comparison, though their software UX feels like it's about two decades behind.
  
  Comparing my experience with Cisco B and C Class, HPE DL and Dell PE server experience over the past 20 years:
  Cisco: Expensive, Good support/service during lifetime of product, excellent management tools w/o buying additional lics, reliable, but eosl/eol is short and poorly supportable after.
  DELL: Just retired some 30 of their servers and storage. No regrets. Expensive, horrible support, licensing is a nightmare, but e360 and online tools were better than others. EOL/EOSL support is okay for a max of 2 yrs afterwards.
  HPE: Just deployed 20 DL380G10+, Cheaper than other 2, licensing is a pita, support is meh, but InfoSight and support costs are cheap and there's good support past eol/eosl.
  I've done the whole white box thing like SuperMicro a number of times and while it is cheaper upfront, it's a headache over time.
  
  We've recently kicked out our entire Cisco networking core due to it actively refusing to interoperate with other pieces of necessary hardware for us, which was causing us to have to run an almost entire second redundant core network. Switching it out with ALE has been really nice in that regard, SPB scales like a dream even between locations and cities, we even get working L2 routes all the way over to some of our locations almost half a country away.
  For us, Dell has been the far better of the two (HPE/Dell) big server-providing beasts in terms of just being able to use the hardware they provide, but they're very close to getting a complete block from future procurement due to how they've been treating us.
  Honestly, Fujitsu is probably our best current provider; their hardware is reasonably solid, their rack-kits aren't insane, their BMC doesn't do a bunch of stupid things, they don't do arbitrary vendor locking on expansion cards, etc. Unfortunately their EFI/BIOS is a complete mess, especially in regards to boot ordering and network boot, and they've so far not been able to provide us Linux-based firmware upgrade packages - despite using a RHEL image in their BMC-orchestrated offline firmware upgrade process.
  
  Yeah, we dumped Cisco for Aruba two years ago. Completely replaced the entire company core network infra. No major complaints.
  On the Enterprise side of things, I was a huge VCE fan pre-Dell days. Only thing close to that now is Pure Flashstack, which isn't bad, just pricey. I'm just not a Dell fan, Michael Dell is a fuck-whit.
  
  I'd stay away from their storage solutions and network gear as well. They are trash.
  
  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.
  
  Yeah I had similar issues. My old laptop (back venue I swore off HP, and one of the contributing reasons) had an issue where if you loaded an app and it needed memory that spanned both RAM chips... it would power cycle. Most users at the time reported the issue using Photoshop at the time so HP released a patch... that fixed it for Photoshop.
  The actual issue lay in the Northbridge of he laptop and was a defect. HP refused to refund the laptop even though it was fairly early within the warranty period. Best I could do was run with one - slightly larger - stick of RAM than what the thing shipped with.
  
  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.
  
  we used to do some warranty work for hp. more often than not, the part waiting for us was the wrong one.
- 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.

59 comments