Quarterflash Designs

I find myself wondering how many different support companies HP uses.

A while back my 6 month old laptop stopped booting up. Lights would come on, but nothing would ever happen. Wouldn’t even boot off of a CD.

So, I send an email, exchange a couple of things with this support person and before I even completely finished running the tests he suggested, I got an email that said they were sending a box for me to ship the laptop back in.

Box comes, I send it out, 5 or 6 days later I have it back with the memory replaced.

Great service, no questions, excellent experience.

Then there was today.I’ve had an HP PSC 750xi for several years now. I don’t even remember how long and it’s just sat here on the desk and copied, printed, and scanned with nary a hickup. The last few months it’s been showing signs of aging though.

Sometimes the scanner doesn’t want to initialize when the printer is powered up. It’s gotten very finicky about accepting ink cartridges, sometimes rejecting them between jobs when the printer hasn’t even been powered down. This morning I look and all the lights on the front are doing the “fast busy” flashing and it’s showing me an error on the display “b8000d08″.

I’m pretty sure that this means it’s the “end of life” for this particular machine, but since I got such great service from HP the last time I thought it might be worth the small effort to send in an email and just confirm it. After all, if it’s a small thing then it’s cheaper to fix it, but I’m guessing that on something like this it’s more expensive to fix than to replace.

Off goes the email and I get a response back: You didn’t put what the OS is that the computer is running that the printer is connected to.

Of course not – when a machine has failed internally it can’t possibly matter what OS the attached box is running. Still, I figure someone is following a script and I’ll not advance to the next stage without an answer, so I reply that I’m running Linux.

I get a response with the following:

I appreciate your patience and coopereation.

Ken, please go through the below weblink for Linux Support Overview. This document provides details about the Linux Operating System, Linux drivers for HP All-in-One products, and resources to locate additional information.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&docname=bpu00658

Please copy the entire URL and paste it in a new window of Internet Explorer and press Enter.

OK, so I haven’t actually looked at the URL yet (and I’ll update this if I’m proven wrong), but after telling her that I’m running Linux, why on earth would she suggest that I paste the URL into Internet Explorer?

*sigh*

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 1036 and is filed under Ramblings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.