HP Laptop

sexki11en

Hi guys, i'm hoping someone can help.

I bought a netbook in the January Sales (not so much on sale at £239 but hey ho) and now 6 months later it's broken. I turned it off before bed the other night and now it won't go back on.

So we took it back to PC world with the receipt who advised we call the tech centre and they would collect it to repair. Sounds fair.

Hubby just got off the phone to them and they're telling him we have to pay £30 postage for a recovery disk!!!:eek: He was quite specific in saying HP are not charging for the disk, just the postage :mad:

This can't be right can it? It's a new product, in warranty and they want us to pay £30 to get it rectified! If it had been something else, they would have sent a courier free of charge!

Can they do this? It's not the amount here, it's the principle.

SK x

bod1467

This sounds like they're planning to send YOU a recovery disk, so YOU can try reinstalling the operating system. This is quite common with people like PC World - they don't give you recovery media at the point of sale unless you specifically request it, then charge you to send it out later. (I'm assuming you still have the laptop - if not then I've misread your post).

Did you have to follow a setup process to install Windows when you first got the laptop? (Most shop-bought computers have an install/recovery partition built in to the hard disk, to allow reinstalls to be done later - i.e. to reset to factory defaults).

sexki11en

Hi Bod,

Yes, this is exactly it.

Widows was already installed on the machine when I got it but can't access the recovery partition.

The problem is, you turn it on, it goes through the Bios instructions, but it fails when it gets to the hard drive. It can't boot anything.

SK x

bod1467

What version of windows? Do you have anything which has the license key on it? (COA - Certificate Of Authenticity). If yes then you could get any suitable install media (borrow off a friend for example) and then install windows using your key. The only downside of this is that this install media may not have all the drivers for your specific hardware, but there would probably be enough to get you going and then use Windows Update to get the remaining software drivers. (Of course, reinstalling - by any method - means you'll lose any data already on the laptop).

But your first course should be to go back to the Tech Guys (there's an oxymoron if ever I've seen one!) and push them for why they want to charge you so that YOU can do their work for them? Insist they either send the recovery disk completely free of charge, or arrange to collect the laptop so they can repair it. It is under warranty and it is their responsibility to effect repair, not yours.

(All above is IMHO ... IANAL and all that.)

visidigi

the get out here is that all HP laptops ship with a disc creator wizard to create a one time set of back up discs.

The problem with that get out on a netbook is that a netbook does not generally have a CD drive, indeed I am not aware of HP shipping a netbook with a CD drive, so the whole idea of a recovery disc seems a bit moronic - unless of course the £30 is for the CD drive and the CD to be able to do the recovery?

All strikes me as a little odd (although not surprising - my laptop is currently with HP for repair under warranty and it took them a week to process the pickup request....so not exactly impressed with the experience...so far.)