hp and

Back in November 2007, I was playing on my HP dv9000z laptop, and all of a sudden my video card had fried on me. It would not boot into graphics mode at all, and text mode (boot to command prompt…) would have green block artifacts randomly appear on the screen. I called up HP for warranty repair, but because it was around 45 days out of warranty they wouldn’t do it, unless I paid $400. I knew it wasn’t under warranty, but it still felt like one of those “let’s design it to break as close to the warranty expiration as we can” sort of things.

Fast forward to a couple months ago; my wife’s cousin told me he was sure there was a recall on some of the recent HP Pavilion dv9000’s for video card trouble. With my success I had with Nintendo a week ago, I thought I’d again try to get my laptop repaired, this time under the recall. As before, I had impeccable timing — I missed the recall deadline by roughly a month and a half. BUT, because they had recorded that I called in about this issue back in November of 2007, they escalated my issue to a case manager who approved an exception!

And now, last weekend I decided to buy an HP printer (and yes, part of the reason was because they were so awesome with my laptop this time around; but the big reason was because the printer I wanted is compatible with Linux). I brought the printer home, hooked it up, and decided to install Ubuntu on my 2nd hard drive. I spent a few minutes getting all my updates installed, and video drivers working (I would add wireless drivers to this list, but my Atheros-based card was working with Ubuntu out of the box!).

I then went to install the HP PhotoSmart 4280 all-in-one drivers and get the printer set up, but to my surprise, it was already done for me. I printed a test page, which worked. Okay, I tried scanning something into the GIMP. That worked, too! The only thing I actually had trouble with, was finding the setting in XSane to tell the printer not to compress the scan, because I could see jpeg artifacts in the scans.

And if the laptop and printer weren’t enough for HP to win my loyalty, I went to buy a replacement ink cartridge and noticed that nowhere on (or in) the packaging was any sort of license agreement, and on top of that, it was $5 cheaper than Lexmark’s stupid-arsed piece of crap they like to call an ink cartridge! If HP continues to treat all their customers like people, they will definitely keep my business.