A coworker’s mother had her PC crash. She talked to some­one on the phone at HP Sup­port and was told that she needed a new moth­er­board. HP would be glad to repair it for the sum of $339 plus ship­ping. It would take approx­i­mately 6 weeks. Jonesing for a PC, mom went ahead and just bought a new one. But she still wanted to fix this one.

The coworker came and asked for my advice on where to get a moth­er­board. I searched around a few places on the net and found them for this PC from $225 to $325, but from no place that I had ever heard of, so I was skep­ti­cal. I asked her to bring me the CPU and I’d look at it. Maybe it was just a toasted power sup­ply or bad hard drive. When I got it and opened it up, noth­ing obvi­ous was wrong, so I turned it on. Non sys­tem disk! I was going to do a sys­tem recover, but I bet­ter ask if there was any valu­able data on the drive first.

The next day I asked the coworker, who asked her mother, who said, “No. Just make it work.” So that night I tired the sys­tem recover option. It got part way through and asked for recov­ery disc #3.

The next day I asked if her mom had any recov­ery discs. Mom did indeed have the disks, she had ordered them from HP over the phone.

Today I got the disks. There are 10 CDs, what could be on all them discs? I’ll never know. When I attempted to boot to disc #1, the sys­tem told me, “These discs are not for this series of Pavil­ion PCs.” Dang, I guess I’ll try and see if the hard drive is any good. I got out my WinXP CD and loaded it on the Pavil­ion. Seemed to take a real long time to for­mat the hard drive, but after that Win­dows loaded right up. I plugged in my net­work cable and was on the net.

I went over to the HP sup­port page and entered the PC’s infor­ma­tion to see if per­haps she got the wrong recov­ery discs. I went through the order process until I got a part num­ber — 34naheblu2 — and found it would cost $16.93 to mail them. The only thing on the plas­tic wrap around the 10 CDs I had was 5069–6299. That’s helpful.

There was a link for online chat sup­port, so I thought I’d give it a whirl to see if they could tell me if I had the right CDs. After 30 min­utes of waltz­ing around, I was informed that the discs I had were the cor­rect discs. The trou­ble is that the PC was old and would need tat­too­ing to accept the discs (ever hear of this?) and I had 2 options; A) return the PC and get HP to fix it or B) take it to an autho­rized ser­vice cen­ter. When I asked what these would cost I was told that the HP option would be $339 (where have I heard that num­ber before?) and that the cost from the autho­rized ser­vice cen­ter would be up to them. The clos­est cen­ter is a Best Buy in Augusta, good luck with that.…

Nice. HP sells you recov­ery discs for $17 and they are worth­less unless you spend another $350 to get them to make your PC able to use them.

If the PC were mine I think it would be time to load Linux, but if I was her, I’d head out to the flea mar­ket this week­end and see about find­ing a pirated copy of XP (or maybe even Vista) for $20.

Click the more link below for the entire sor­did details of the chat, mis­spellings and all.
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