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My neighbor bought an HP with XP two months ago. Right now the tower is on it's way back to HP. Yep, the hard drive crashed and there was no way to bring it back up. Of course, they'll "replace" it for free, but meanwhile, the billings for her business are stuck in limbo. No billing, no income. So she had to go out and buy a laptop just to get her billings done.

When they told her to send it back, they said they would ship her a prepaid shipping box. It took three weeks for the box to arrive; Lord only knows how long it will take for them to return the tower.

I think the days of the 'buy direct' sellers are numbered unless they open walkin repair facilities. Now that so many people are really using computers the story is getting around about how long you can lose your machine when it has to be repaired.

Being inflicted with severe CLWFR (can't live without FreeRepublic) I bought my box from compusa with a warantee that expressly promises me a new machine if this one dies and afger that I can still get it fixed quickly without having to mess around with shipping.... AND WAITING.

When they told her to send it back, they said they would ship her a prepaid shipping box. It took three weeks for the box to arrive; Lord only knows how long it will take for them to return the tower.

I will NEVER recommend an HP Pavillion to anyone, and I'm warrany authorized, and an authorized HP dealer! I have a client who bought all their PC's at BestBuy, and they had a hard drive failure (BTW, when HP said that if the drive crashes, you don't normally lose the "recovery partition," that's an out and out lie!). It took four months for them to get the warranty replacement! It was a stinking 20GB drive! After 24 days of waiting, I suggested that they buy a replacement drive, that I'd install it at no charge, then when the new drive came in, they'd keep it on a shelf as a spare. Just to get back up and running, that's what they did.

Please note that I don't think that Brios are too bad, and the Vectras and NetServers are terrific... It's just the Pavillions that are crap, with no support from HP.

Mark