Compaq Tech Support

[boredevilperson.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Mid last week my sister in law called me to say they were having problems with my brother's computer (a year and a half old Compaq) It kept running slowly and shutting down.

She already figured it was Windows XP getting bogged down with Internet crap so she backed up the important stuff and tried to do a restore. The restore disc was not working.

So she calls Compaq Tech support and they send her out a new set of restore CDs. Starts a restore again, same thing. She managed to get it to a point where Windows would at least come up but it was still running very slowly and shutting down.

From what she said it sounds like Compaq didn't do much troubleshooting and told her that a fan must have gone bad so it's overheating and she'll need to take it to a service center. She wasn't left with a good feeling after dealing with these people. Plus she didn't want to take it to a service center.

So she called me up to see if I could take a look. I got out there yesterday and started it up. Yup very slow and just doesn't seem to want to work well.

I restarted it and went into system setup looking for Diagnostics. I stumbled on a Hard Drive diagnostic utility built into the BIOS. Was actually thinking this might be a memory issue but I figured "Why not" So I run it. "This will take 50 minutes to run" about a minute into it the message said "Hard drive needs replacement"

So we run to Circuit City, buy a Western Digital (those are still good right?) and replace the Maxtor drive with that. Computer restores fine and is back to normal.

I'm just surprised that Compaq tech support didn't have her run any diagnostic utilities on the system to determine the problem. Particularly when it's built into the BIOS. Then again, maybe I'm not surprised. I guess it's not a huge deal because the service center would've determined the cause and fixed it (for a fee) but still. Just seems that they didn't try at all on this one. I could be wrong though!

Oh well.

Comments

[nirvanaqween.livejournal.com]

I used to work for Compaq Tech Support, and yeah that our answer to everything, infact we had a day called free spin friday, where on friday we would see how many people we could spin (the term spin comes from the spinning of the restore cd )

But since Compaq moved all of their support centers to India, causing the loss of over 1,000 people at my employer , they have gone down hill, well i guess it was since the merged with HP, and THAN moved all the call centers over seas, in 2002. I have since been without work.

So yeah i would suggest that you never buy a compaq, and why even bother calling the tech support line, i will no longer support a company that doesnt support american jobs, but instead pays people in a nother fucking contry 2 bucks and hour to pretend there names are Robert and John.

For more information, Google THE ANSWER GROUP, NORTH LAUDERDALE FLORIDA or the SUN-SENTINAL archives in the middle of 2002. Its all there. We made the paper quite a few times, as our company of 4,000+ employes doint strickly technical support for , Compaq, IBM, Gateway, Best Buy, Compaq Commercial Units, as well as Notebook and Printers, he made quite the stink about boycotting both Compaq and HP in the future. :)

WD Drive

[kalidor.livejournal.com]

Depending on who you talk to yes. In my personal experience, yes WD is still pretty good, if you make sure all all your peices are good. The most common failure on WD's that I've seen (about 20 WD's a week) has been trying to run the drive in UDMA mode with a 40 wire IDE cable instead of an 80 wire one. Both MS and WD have acknowledged this as a known issue.

I tend to put Seagate and WD in the top of hirearchy .. failure rates of about 2%-15% of the time. Samsung is somwhere in the 15% - 40%. And Maxtors ... well ... everyone I've known that has had major drive issues has had these. In fact, once upon a time Maxtor's had a confirmed failure rate in the 70 percentiles.

[bamatone.livejournal.com]

About hard drive brands: I have had very good experiences with Western Digital and Seagate both. The only bad experience I had was with a Quantum Bigfoot that came with my HP Pavilion years ago. It didn't last more than a year and a half. My WDs and Seagate drives have all lasted me at least three years. *knock on wood* I also have friends who swear by Maxtor... I think in this day and age the big companies have basically got it right, finally.

About customer support: I have *never* liked Compaq, either in my own experience or through friends' stories. You're right that the first thing they should have done is run some kind of diagnostics. I have called Dell support a few times for a friend, and every time I've had a knowledgeable person (speaking excellent unaccented English, heh) who recognized I knew what I was talking about and directed me to the diagnostic software.

Now the general public is finding out why HP shareholders fought so hard to stave off the Compaq merger. Anyone who knew anything about HP and Compaq knew HP was getting a raw deal.

[j-digi82.livejournal.com]

I don't know about any of that but I find your buddy icon quite amusing. =)

I have long ago just lowered my standards and gave into the Corporate Machine ... Dell is the new Microsoft for hardware anyway; Gateway, HP/Compaq & company are all doing pretty shitty in comparison. Give it a few years to dwindle profit margins and things will start to get pretty interesting. I bet they'll move tech support center operations to countries that don't even have electricity! They'll just give them some index cards, probably even colored one's to the sweat masters ... HP makes printers after all, you'd think it'd be a no brainer.

Anymore in this day an age if you want tech support, you'd better be your own or you're screwed.

But still ... quite and inspiring buddy icon. =)

Compaq tech support IS THE BEST

[(Anonymous)]

> "Hi I need to order some restore CDs for a Compaq (or HP) XYZ."
"Why do you need restore CDs?"
> "The hard drive failed."
"Oh well you can't put in a new hard drive, it won't work."
> "Could you please give me the number for the parts department so I can order the restore CDs?"
"OK but you won't be able to use them if it isn't a Compaq hard drive."

Then hilarity ensued as the numbers we were given were looped around several times, each number was wrong and as we gathered more of them we started getting dupes of old numbers that were known to not be the correct parts department.
Once we finally got to parts the actual process of ordering the restore CDs was painless. Though, an interesting bit here, the latest HPs (I think) use the same CD set for every single one and just run a utility to pick out the correct software and drivers for that model. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) We had to order two copies of the restore discs for two different customers. One of them was $50. The other was $15. They were the EXACT SAME CDs.

Oh yeah, just in case anyone was wondering about those original discs, they worked juuust fine on a new hard drive. Go figure. --Colin

P.S. I've seen so many failed WD hard drives in the shop that I cannot recommend them at all. (And they don't just slowly start to fail, they fail spontaneously and spectacularly -- either they just decide not to spin up anymore or they decide that they aren't going to report themselves to the BIOS anymore...) Their old drives were great, the ones that were sub-20GB, but anything later than that (anything with a yellow label) is shit as far as I'm concerned. At least most Maxtor drive failures are partially recoverable. (They seem to be the largest OEM distributor -- Dell uses them -- and for the volume we get in, percentage-wise, very few have failed.) Seagate drives are absolute best when it comes to failure rates, from what I've seen. We've had probably 5-6 out of several hundred ever be bad (one of them was DoA with SMART failures, another one of our techs was couriering when someone in front of him decided to stop quickly, so he had to stop quickly, and it was sitting loose in his front seat...oops...) Samsung we see so rarely (only used in eMachines it seems) I can't form a good opinion on, but seeing as how they're used in eMachines, some of the cheapest pieces of crap ever, I wouldn't trust them...
I would definitely go with Seagate now (I'm going to on my next purchase), especially now that they've raised their warranties on all their drives to 5 years.

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

1. BLARRGGGH MAXTOOORRR =/
2. It's the BIOS that recognizes the disc(or vice versa), not the HDD. stupid compaq techies =/
3. I have a 4 and a half year old Quantum Fireball that's still going strong. And I pray that as I type this, the heads don't explode and slag out the platters....