In the last installment of my ongoing support nightmare, I had picked up a computer from Best Buy technicians which they thought was fixed after they replaced the hard drive. The OS was wiped out within 15 minutes of using it, however, so I took it back. Again, I mentioned that given the variety of different problems, it was almost certainly a problem with either the motherboard, the power supply, or the RAM.
Again, though, they completely ignored my suggestion even though their own problems with the machine just added more evidence that it was likely one of these problems. I picked the machine up yesterday from Best Buy, and it’s already completely unusable. It crashed about every 10 minutes, even if I restricted myself ot simple tasks like web browsing. Finally, one of the crashes fried the Windows ME registry and other files, and it won’t boot properly.
The interesting thing is that they saw two additional problems that should have tipped them off. First, when they turned it on, the machine claimed the processor fan was not functioning properly, but could find nothing wrong with the fan.
Second, they pulled out a Soundblaster 512 card I had installed with a little note that it was incompatible with Windows ME. Not quite. The manufacturer claims that the 512 is compatible with ME, but from discussions I found from search engines on the topic, getting the card to actually work in Windows ME is like pulling teeth.
But the interesting thing is that the card is completely incompatible with this machine (or more likely, there’s something wrong with the PCI bus). With the card installed, the computer literally would not boot up at all. Take it out, and it would boot up, but then crash repeatedly. Just to make sure there was nothing wrong with the card, I put it in a couple of other machines I have, and it performed flawlessly in those.
So I’ve pretty much had it with Best Buy and called HP tonight to give them an earful about the alleged service provided there. Fortunately the guy I reached was as incredulous as I was that, given the problems I’ve experienced, they hadn’t replaced the motherboard (which he thought was the likely source of the problem). He gave me the phone number of a different authorized technician here as well as some tips on dealing with them to get the motherboard seriously looked at and/or replaced.