God damn, I’m really ready to get on a plane and throw my laptop through HP’s front window now! As I detailed in this thread:
Basically, at around a year and a few months (just past the warranty) the HD inside the laptop failed. They refused to provide any real support besides offering a new HD at a price of over five times the retail NewEgg.com price. Fuckers. Anyway, it was a Toshiba HD, and as it turned out, it had a 5 year warranty from Toshiba themselves, and they agreed to replace the drive. It took over 40 days to get the new HD back, and when I did, I tried to plug it into the computer, and the BIOS just didn’t recognize it. As it turned out, there was a “connector bar” between the HD and the rest of the laptop that looked like it was part of the HD and so got sent into Toshiba. Of course, once Toshiba’s repair department got it they just threw the thing away. See page 40 of this document here to know what the hell I’m talking about: http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c00246219.pdf
Well, god damn it. So, I called HP Tech Support to figure out how to get a new one. Hours of phone-pong sends me over to the parts department where I come to a tech person that absolutely assures me that forking out $18 + $10 s/h will get me a hard-drive holder that includes the connector bar. Of course, once I shill out $30 for this part, it doesn’t include the connector bar they said it would. So, back on the horn to bitch at them and get them to refund the mother-effing part. They do, but then it’s back to square one. After multiple suggestions from multiple people to buy this exact same part all over again, and many explanations that no, I definitely don’t need this part, they have left me with this wonderful set of options:
Order a new HD from them (for $372 vs. New Egg’s $72) and maybe the part will come packaged with the new HD
Pay $269 to send the laptop in to HP and have them repair the laptop plus the actual part costs and labor.
Mother fuckers. All for a stupid little maybe $1.00-.50 part. No, I’d rather use what’s left of my non-functional laptop to send it sailing through HP’s front-window. I’ll use the cash left over from not using HP to repair the laptop to buy myself a plane ticket out to Pomona, California or where ever it is that these little cretins live.
Laptops suck, especially if it’s your only computer. My boyfriend has an older Dell that just seems to constantly have parts going out on it. He finally got a regular hard drive installed in an external casing last Xmas, it connects by USB. He got it to back up because his internal hard drive keeps crashing. I had a Compaq laptop that I bought when I was in high school, damn keys on the keyboard kept falling off and the hard drive physically crashed at one point and had to be replaced.
Have you considered maybe trying to find someone with the same model laptop that’s kaput and salvage the part somehow that way? You might even try eBay or some local computer repair places, a lot of them will just have boxes of parts sitting around and if you go somewhere you can walk in, you can show them exactly what you need.
Have you been dealing with mainly customer service or tech support? If so that may be your problem. Most of these people have never actually taken a laptop apart and wouldn’t know anything except what’s on the screen in front of them.
Try asking for a supply or assembly manager. You may need to go outside of their 1-800 number system, but you need to talk to someone who can tell you exactly what part number is that you’re looking for and how to get it.
If you’ve done this already with no luck, then that really really sucks
Have you tried a local “indie” (i.e. non-big box) computer shop? Whenever I run into little problems like needing a hard drive screw, I head over there and they’re always tremendously helpful.
threemae, you’re one of the few that has been a fed up with HP as I. You buy the whisky, I’ll drive. My officejet should make a nice hole in one of their windows. Or maybe the CEO’s head.
Then we steal all their computers and party in Vegas like sultans.
Here’s your item for $ 22.00. If you keep an eye on eBay for a few weeks you can probably get what you want. You might even they cointacting that buyer to see if they need the interface bar specifically or if they’re willing to sell it.
You might also try contacting ebay sellers who are “parting out” a ZE4400 with a defective MB or broken LCD and selling parts of it. Chances are they probably have your part even if it’s not listed, as it’s an odd part and they figure they’d just throw it in if someone bought the chassis.
Oh hell yes, astro, you rock. I asked them about this tray specifically, and they told me no, it wasn’t included, and even then, they said they didn’t have any of the trays in stock. I eBayed around a bit under the laptop model name, but all I found were a bunch of eBay stores trying to sell replacement power cords, although now I think I have a slightly better idea of what to look for on eBay, and hopefully I’ll have my connector bar within a week at least.
duffer, absolutely I’m down. I’ll more than chip in for gas.
Did you see the new lawsuit regarding HP printers?
"Lawsuit Over Cartridge Deception
According to MercuryNews.com, HP is being sued by a Georgia woman, who alleges that their smart-chip technology “deceives consumers into buying new inkjet cartridges before the ink has run out.”
According to the article, the suit says that "The smart chip is dually engineered to prematurely register ink depletion and to render a cartridge unusable through the use of a built-in expiration date that is not revealed to the consumer.’’
Update: Apparently, the lawsuit seeks to represent anyone in the United States who purchased an HP inkjet printer since Feb. 2001. So if you fall into this category, you might want to keep your eye on this one…"
HP really, really sucks. Or at least they do now. Their products are uneccesarily clunky, poorly programmed, and seem out more to screw the consumer than help them. Case in point is their insane printer drivers which demand to run constantly in the taskbar, take like a minute to start up EVERY TIME you want to print anything, and are just totally, completely unecessary. They pis sme off something AWFUL!
Yeah… I forgot that the awful desktop I got, after the laptop finally got to be too annoying, was an HP Pavilion. There were so many rebates and discounts that it ended up being really cheap and that was all I could afford ($600, which is what I got for the used laptop).
That POS seemed to need Windows installed on it again every 3-6 months. The hard drive had to be replaced within a couple months of getting it. And when I finally knew someone that knew what they were doing and we opened up the tower, they crammed so much shit in such a tiny case, no wonder the damn thing kept crapping out. There was NO airflow what-so-ever in it and the entire case had one little 80mm fan. I think that’s a problem with most big box computer sellers, though. I suppose it’s to their advantage that your parts start crapping out after warranty expires, more incentive to just buy a whole new machine for the less computer savvy. I still have that little 15GB hard drive from that HP, though the rest of the computer is long gone.
Since I learned how and started building my own PC/doing my own upgrades and maintenance, coincidentally crashes and need to replace hardware has gone waaaay down. And it’s cheaper in the long run because you can upgrade piecemeal as you need it, easily, instead of dealing with a bunch of proprietary vendor parts and tower layouts.
I’ve been told there’s a budding market out there for do-it-yourself laptops with interchangable parts, along similar lines. I haven’t seen them myself though.
