Lets start with the positives and move toward the negatives.

This laptop was very cheap when I bought it in January 2002. Over the past 13 months since I made the purchase, the price for any new notebook has been that low in my area once - the first week of February 2003.

The laptop works fine mostly for basic office programs. It is not a gaming computer - it choked badly when I tried to play Sim City 4 on it. By choking, I mean that animation seems to reduce to 3-4 frames per second. When I change the zoom, I am literally waiting over 10 seconds for the graphics to finish updating. The tiny trident video card is likely the cause; you get what you pay for. I know that the system memory should not be an issue because I upgraded to 384MB of RAM on my computer.


At over 7 lbs, the laptop is on the heavy side, but it is something I can live with. The heaviness of the laptop causes me to shift the laptop to my other shoulder every quarter of a mile because it starts to become very uncomfortable to continue carrying it in one hand. This is a huge issue, as I work at a large pedestrian-oriented university campus. Again, I got what I paid for; cheap instead of light.


The battery lasts 45-50 minutes using regular business applications like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, which is short compared to the 1.5-2 hours that my friends with Intel chips use. And this is with the Power Now! function activated to save up to 30% of the battery life. Not impressive.


USB is another problem. Some of my USB devices will work totally fine. Devices that are in constant communication with notebook will cease functioning after some time, if they are detected at all at boot up. Unplugging the non-working USB device and re-plugging it in will resolve the problem. This gets very annoying when you have to unplug-replug several times an hour. Worse, about 10-15% of the time that I replug in the USB devices, the computer instantaneously crashes with a blue screen of death, causing me to waster time restarting and causing me to lose any unsaved document (I've adopted a protocol of saving before unplugging-replugging the USB devices - the computer still crashes, but as least I don't lose my data).

When I talk about USB devices that are in constant communication, I am talking about devices constantly sending and/or receiving information with the computer. Devices that I've had stop responding include a mouse, a keyboard, and my palm sync. The mouse and keyboard simply stop responding when this happens. The palm sync fails during the sync process causing me to have to restart the whole sync process. When the USB devices fail, all of the rest of the computer continues to work just fine. It's like the USB devices have dropped totally out of existence. I've attached these USB devices to several other computers and I've never had any problems with the devices ceasing to function.

At one point during one of my tech support calls, HP suggested that the USB ports didn't provide enough power to the USB devices. I bought a powered USB hub, but the devices continued to lose communication like normal. I've also tried an unpowered USB hub, also with the exact same results.

Drivers were also suggested as a problem, but there are none for this laptop or for the USB port. I've also tried patches offered by Microsoft for Windows without any improvement in the situation. For those of you interested, the USB port is made by ALi for HP. ALi is owned by Acer.


Then we have technical support. I'll list out the trouble:

1) When I bought the laptop, they offered a toll-free line, but they've eliminated it. Now I have to pay long distance to call them.

2) The waiting time for calls has increased since they got rid of the toll-free line.

3) They lost my whole call history with them and pretty
much called me a liar about calling previously, until I told them I had long distance bills that show several 30+ min phone calls to their customer support.

4) They broke promises to provide support for outstanding issues that were unresolved when the warranty expired because they had no record of previous calls (see 3). Now, they expect me to pay $35 per call.

5) They lied to me; they claimed I had never made any previous calls. Then they told me they had one previous call on record, but no information on the previous call. They also reported I made that call on a certain date, but then they said that the call happened a week earlier.

Furthermore, in one call, I asked to speak with a supervisor and the customer service representative refused because it was against company policy. In a call a few weeks later, I asked to speak to a supervisor and the customer service representative immediately took action to pass me on.

6) They kept on passing the buck for support. They claimed that my USB peripherals were flawed, although I was able to use the USB peripherals perfectly fine on several other computers.

They suggested that there were incompatibilities with their USB port, but they had the gall to say that the incompatibilities were never due to HP and that it was the responsibility of other companies to be compatible with HP's products.

I contacted the peripheral makers and we determined that there were no problems with the peripherals. HP continued to provide support.

7) They refused to provide support for Windows XP because it was not provided by them. True the machine came with Windows ME, but months earlier HP had a $100 price offer for an upgrade to Windows XP.

8) Several customer service representatives fed me lines that the problems I had with my USB devices had nothing to do with HP, as soon as I said I had problems with the USB devices; they had already decided to refuse support before the call was made.

9) One customer service representative refused to provide any support because the USB peripherals I used were not made by HP. It did not matter that I had problems with devices made by several different manufacturers.

10) The worst insult was that they decided my USB device was working perfectly because I was able to print three lines of text with my USB laser printer. They considered it irrelevant that I had several USB other devices that ceased working every few dozen minutes. These USB other devices were made by several different companies.


I should note that all of these customer support problems have started since January 1, 2003. Support before this year was on par with other technical support experiences I've had with other companies. They used to always try to find a solution and they used to be willing to consider the possibility that their product may have a flaw in it. Now, I get the impression that unless my product doesn't work as it was set up out of the box, I'm on my own.


Based on the experience with HP Customer Support and the unresolved problems with running my USB, I'll never buy from them again!

Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 930
Operating System: Windows
Processor: AMD Athlon (K7)
Processor speed: 801-900
Screen Size: 14 inches
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20