Crossing my fingers
It’s amazing how few companies in the world will actually accept responsibility for anything. That PC still doesn’t work. I was in the office until 9 last night doing a system restore, bringing the PC to exactly the state it shipped in two weeks ago, and then, when the problem still existed, talking to HP support. My thinking was that since it obviously shipped with this flaw, they should do something about it. They wanted me to troubleshoot, and asked about programs I might have installed, security settings I had configured etc. I hadn’t done any of that. I restored it to the way they shipped it, gave it an IP address and setup a couple of different email accounts. Obviously, it did not work out of the box. Their final “less than useful” suggestions were to contact my system admin, which of course, is me, or to call Microsoft, since it’s obviously an operating system issue with the email and they’re not trained to handle that.
Of course right there at the top of Microsoft’s support page is the “If your OS came pre-installed contact the manufacturer” message, which tells me everything I need to know about that option! So who, exactly is capable of troubleshooting an OEM XP install?
After talking to my CDW account rep this morning, he asked me to talk to their tech support, who helpfully informed me that they don’t support the software that comes with the PC’s, just the hardware. Back to the sales rep and it appears that because it’s been less than 30 days he should be able to authorize a complete replacement, but I’m still waiting for confirmation of that fact. (Please let this happen, although the not quite finalized purchase of two other systems from CDW gives them some incentive to get this right, because until this one works, I’m not ordering those!)
So my question is, who is capable of supporting an OEM operating system? If the manufacturer won’t, MS won’t, and the reseller won’t, what’s a user to do when there’s a problem with the pre-installed OS?
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