I’d recommend HP printers with my eyes closed -although I do loath the bloatware they ship with it which also masquerades as the driver. However the printer drivers are easily available -if you have the bandwidth necessary to download them. Notebooks however are a different story. Purchasing a couple of notebooks every two weeks or so (and sometimes more) I feel guilty purchasing a Compaq or a HP machine for people who don’t have the budget (or are way too stingy) to stretch their budget to reach that of the lowest Thinkpad. They think that they have a nice looking laptop for a cheap price without realizing what they are setting themselves up for in the near future. You obviously get what you pay for. I’m fed up of seeing Compaq & HP laptops turn in for hardware related problems in a couple of years (which are plonked onto my table and hence becomes “my problem”). Last Friday a good friend of mine needed to get his laptop fixed. I remembered how I had struggled with it a few years back to install the sound drivers. I forgot what I did back then, luckily for me he had saved the link. Here it is for fellow strugglers, hope this cuts down your work and gets you somewhere.
After struggling for 2 days and searching repeatedly on Google I finally gave up. I noticed others were having this problem too and even posting stuff on HP forums to which HP support would not respond! Some crackpot even posted a link to Nvidia motherboard drivers (and the dumb moderator allowed it) -so after downloading about 80Mb of junk…. thanks HP! It seemed so Mac like to pretend there was no problem at all (referring to my past experiences with my ipod classic which put me off any Mac product for good) The usual Search on HP Support turned out a lot of bull for Windows XP. If I remember right this product shipped with Vista and was downgraded out of necessity to Windows XP Professional. Here is how you fix it. Watch out for all those weird numbered files that you download and rename them appropriately. If some file extracts and doesn’t run, you will find its folder in c:\SWSETUP\SPxxxxx folder where xxxxx is the number of the file you downloaded. Make sure you are on broadband connection as all the drivers are about 55-60 Mb each.
Somewhere in between, I tried the Nvidia site to see whether it would autodetect the motherboard or display drivers -as before it did not. This means that either the motherboard/display does not have Nvidia chipsets or that the detection failed as it did on many previous occasions on other products on which I was sure there was a Nvidia chip. HP update too was one big sham. After the download, it kept updating itself and downloading a security fix (What were they thinking when they retained the unfixed file and put it up for download?) when I finished everything, HP update was still bouncing a ball which turned red/green alternately and doing nothing else…
I suggest you give the HP/Compaq brand of Notebooks a big avoid. Their printers however are excellent -I especially love their network printers and their ease of install in a heterogeneous network of Linux, Mac & Windows computers. The credit for the Linux ease of install however goes to the hard working folks who maintain the distro and contribute to various parts that make up Linux.
10th June 2009 : I had a similar problem with a Sony Vaio laptop. The model number did not match anything on their support site, their auto-detect tool (which works only on Internet Explorer) failed too. Finally on a Sony site from another country the auto detect tool reported a different model number, but kept insisting the laptop was bought in Thailand. (It was bought in Mumbai, India ). Luckily the user had his user manual with him which had a totally different model number but was close to what was “auto-detected” . The 17.2Mb audio download has been going on for most of the day as the Sony server doesn’t seem to have enough capacity to serve its customers. The crazy part was that there were two boxes to type in the product code and serial number. As I entered the numbers from the sticker under the notebook the red circles turned into green tick marks, but when I tried to save the info by clicking on the button I kept getting the error message, “The information entered does not comply, please check your inputs”. So much for support from a tech leader such as Sony!! What a waste of time… Moral of the story…. Keep your recovery disks in a safe place for when you need them… nobody cares for after sales service like before…
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