Swap Blog

Well touchpad of the Team HP Laptop began to mess up last night. It would work until the right mouse button was hit and then it would stop functioning entire (both to move or select). When we pluged a USB mouse in it (the USB mouse) worked perfect and all the other features on the box worked. After both a spyware and virus scan (one of which found something and deleted it) a reboot changed nothing. At this point I decided to call HP to see if this was known hardware condition / issue.

Twenty five minutes later I get “Ed” from Mumbai. He has me do the normal stuff (which I told him I had already done, but did again to make him happy) and we finally got where we could understand each other (the langauge barrier was steep due to my Southern English and his Mubaiglish). At that point he had me uninstall the trackpad driver and then re-install it from driver restore. Ok that sounds fine.

Guess what after that the trackpad did not work AT ALL, even after reboot. He had me go to the bios (no trackpad options there, but he just would not believe me). Another reboot and still no trackpad (not in the device list, was not found as new hardware on boot, could not be detected via add new hardware, etc). He wanted me to get on the web so I set the phone down (I did NOT put him on hold), got the cat 5 plugged in and picked up the phone (maybe 30 seconds total). “Ed” was not there, he hung up.

THANKS HP!!! THANKS!! Way to leave a customer hanging. Just hang up when you told them to uninstall the trackpad driver and it stopped working. Way to leave them with a DOA trackpad and a malfunctioning machince. That really makes me want to support your company.

Fortunately the USB mouse still worked and I am not the average bear user. I got online, went to the Synoptics (maker of the trackpad adn driver) site, downloaded a “new” driver and got the trackpad working again, or at least functioning. It is still doing the same thing - working until a certain point and then stopping. At this point I am not 100% that it is not more then just a hardware glitch, but time will tell. I really do not want to send it in for repair, but I may have too.

Until then, I am using the USB mouse and looking for a solution, but this is NO WAY TO TREAT A CUSTOMER!!! If I had not known more about computers then the tech I would have been SCREWED!!! Stuff like this is why people hate tech support lines.

IF (when) I call back I am asking to go straight to a supervisor.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 10:51 am and is filed under Personal, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.