HP Laptop Repair

Through the grapevine I heard that my neighbor was trying to replace the hard drive in her laptop and needed some help. I figured she was upgrading her machine to a larger hard drive. Having been inside a couple of laptops before, I imagined all kinds of tedious, nit-picky work that would need to be done very carefully to avoid destroying the machine.

Not the case. The hard drive had died in her HP laptop, so she called HP and they sent her a
replacement. It was a piece of cake to replace it. Take out two screws on the hard drive cover. The only problem here was picking the right cover. There are three: one for memory, one for the DVD drive and one for the hard drive. I picked the DVD drive first, but I quickly realized my error, and with only two screws, no big deal. Open up the hard drive cover and there's the hard drive, but how do you get it out? There is supposed to be a string or tape or something to grab hold of. Oh, here's a clear plastic tab. Pull on it and the drive comes right out.

I call her over and have her do the actual work. She replaces the hard drive, puts the battery in, turns it over and turns it on. No Operating Systems On Disk. They sent her a blank hard drive. So now she has to wade through the Windows installation procedure. Except that she doesn't have any Windows CD's. The computer didn't come with any. So another call to HP is in order.

Don't really like HP. That rotten Carly Fiorina took one of the most prestigious names in electronic test equipment and turned it into a lowest common denominator commodity. The test equipment division got a new name: Agilent. Who's had any experience with Agilent? But I will give HP credit for making the memory and drives user replaceable. No thanks to Carly, she's long gone.