Lexington Computer Repair Blog

Customers ask me quite often my advice on what brand of new laptop computer to buy. Personally I favour Thinkpads, I’ve been using them for almost 20 years and I’ve never had one fail me yet. I have 3 of them here in the house that are at least 7 years old and they are still going strong (OK, the X22 has some screen issues but it’s still very serviceable). Generally though I tell people to look for a good deal on a laptop, get one with a dual-core processor and 1 or 2 GB RAM and they should be OK whether it’s Dell or Toshiba or Gateway or whatever Best Buy happens to be selling at the time. I have now added to my advice the following – whatever you do, don’t get an HP laptop. Sure, all manufacturers have some problems and you’ll find no shortage on the internet of pissed-off owners of various kinds of laptops, but in my experience the consistency of problems with HP Pavillion laptops is unequaled.

I’m a small repair shop in a relatively small town. There are probably 30 other computer repair places here in Lexington and maybe 50 if you draw a bigger circle around the “Greater Lexington Area”. I figure I probably do about 10% of the repair business that Geek Squad gets and I’m probably right it the middle for the amount of business the average small repair shop handles. In the last two weeks, I alone have had a dozen, that’s 12, HP Pavillion owners come to me with the exact same problem. Right now here I have 2 DV2000, 2 DV9000, a TX 1000 and a DV6000 Pavillion here for repair. Now that sounds good for me but it’s bad for the owners. All of these computers suffer from the same design flaw that causes them to overheat and burn out the wireless card, the video chip and/or the power distribution chip. In each case, the fix is to replace the system board – a pretty expensive proposition. Now, if my little shop is seeing this many of these machines, many of which are only 2 years old, imagine how many of them are really out there!

Of course HP knows about this problem. To their credit, HP started a recall of these machines, well their term for it was “Limited Service Enhancement Program” a while back. Unfortunately, they didn’t cover all of the machines that appear to suffer from the problem and, I guess because they didn’t name it a “Recall”, the time period to report your machine for a deservedly free repair was limited. So, even if your machine was poorly designed and even if HP know about it, and even if they admitted it had a problem and offered to fix it for you, if you didn’t know about the offer or are a few days “late” in enquiring about it, you’re screwed. Pay them $260 to change the system board or go buy a new computer. That’s not right.

I called HP today on behalf of a customer and spoke over a very bad telephone line to one of HP’s agent’s who must have been in the Phillipines. As best I could tell his name was Debie, maybe it was Randie, it was a very bad line. He told me, “Mr. Hamrin, your machine is out of warranty but was covered under our Limited Service Enhancement Program. Unfortunately though, this extended program ran out in October.” Now, I explained to Debie/Randie that the machine actually had been broken since October, but it took the owner a couple extra weeks to report it (I was calling HP on 18 November). No dice says, Debie/Randie, it’s too late, you should have called in October. You have no recourse. Debie/Randie told me that he was the final authority on this.

Sorry HP, that’s not right. You sold a defective computer, you should fix it, period.

So if you have an HP Pavillion DV 2000, DV 6000, DV 9000, TX 1000, TX 2000 or any other HP Pavillion laptop that is showing any of the following behaviours, call HP at 1 800 HP INVENT right away and ask for a new system board:

• HP Pavillion Wireless card won’t turn on
• HP Pavillion won’t power on
• HP Pavillion graphics freeze

If your computer is either under warranty or just out of warranty, maybe you’ll still be under their program, I hope you are. If you aren’t, my advice is to get your files off your HP and take it as a lesson learned that you should never buy an HP laptop.

Edit (24/2/10): If you would like to get an idea of the scope of this problem and HP’s indifference to it or if you would like some instruction on taking HP to small claims court, go to this excellent HP problems site.

You know it’s fashionable, and generally quite reasonable, to hate your cable company and/or broadband provider. When we lived in England, I had a choice of at least a dozen broadband providers and could select the cheapest, the one with the best service, the one with the fastest broadband or the best services or whatever. Here in the US though they’ve figured out a way to make broadband a virtual monopoly in most geographies and what’s not to hate about your local monopoly communications provider? Having said that though, we’ve lived in Lexington now for 18 months (30 years by extension if you count my parents) and my experience with Insight, the local cable broadband provider, has been consistently good.

For example, in 18 months, my broadband has been down for zero minutes, that’s right, I’ve never been disconnected from the matrix (unless you count the time that one of my neighbors got on my wireless and started sharing movies, Insight shut off my service at the request of the MPAA apparently but this got fixed politely and promptly with a call and explanation). By contrast, my parents’ phone line (not from Insight) has been out at least a half dozen times for a few hours to a few days during that same timeframe.

Last week I (finally) replaced my rented cable modem with one I have purchased. I called Insight, spoke to a CSR within minutes, he was helpful and cheerful and stayed on the phone with me until my new modem was up and working – that’s not the way monopolies are supposed to behave. I would say that generally I get pretty good reports from my customers about their interactions with Insight as well.

Fifteen years ago when I moved abroad, American business was the paragon of customer service. I often bragged to my colleagues in Europe about how much better customers were treated here. Alas, in a great capitalist race to the bottom, real courtesy and the quality of customer care seem to have fallen precipitously. I would contrast real customer care with the fake, crap customer care you receive whenever you hear that recording, “Your call is important to us so please stay on the line…”, I call bullshit on that, if my call was really important you would have hired a few more reps and answered it on the third bloody ring not put me into a 20 minute queue. (I realise I’m digressing here but don’t stop me, I’m on a roll) Here’s another example:

Crap Customer Care: “All our agents are busy right now helping other customers…”

Good Customer Care: “Hello, how can I help you?”

Crap Customer Care: “We are experiencing heavy call volumes due to the weather/the holidays/sunspots/incompetent management…”

Good Customer Care: “Hello, how can I help you?”

Crap Customer Care: “Our call options have changed so please listen to the entire announcement (as I blather on endlessly while you try to guess which choice will bring you to a real person and which one to some stupid recording)…”

Good Customer Care: “Hello, how can I direct your call?”

OK, I’m feeling a little better now. Before I got carried away I was writing about Insight and of course they have these ubiquitous automated attendents but I seem to be able to consitantly get to a person when I call them and that person seems to be consitantly helpful. What more can I ask for? Well done Insight.

I think I’ve mentioned here before why I got into computer repair, it’s because I like helping people. I’ve got a skill for fixing computer problems, people need help – it works. Trust me when I tell you that you shouldn’t do this for this money, let’s just leave it at that.

I normally get one or two calls a week from people with problems that can be solved pretty simply over the phone. If it’s something that I can spend 5-10 minutes with someone and get their problem fixed, why have them schlep their computer into the shop and charge them a service fee for a simple issue? I just can’t see it; and I know the way I’d like to be treated if it was me, so if I can I will just walk them through a quick solution. Honestly, I don’t know if this idea scales. That is, if I started to get 20 non-revenue calls a week like this, would I still feel so eleemosynary? I’m not sure, but I have increased my advertising emphasis on “free advice” so we’ll have to see what happens going forward.

Actually, after only a few hours I got some feedback on this strategy. At 11:30 last night my business phone rang. I hesitated to answer it, but I was so curious about who would call me at that late hour and what would be on their mind I couldn’t help myself so I picked it up. It turned out that it was a guy named David from Oklahoma who had a problem with the sound on his computer. I think he had just spent his last cent on a new Hard Drive and his computer wasn’t working and he was desperate. I guess he had called some of the 24/7 services and they of course won’t help you with anything until you turn over your credit card. Who knows how many repair shops he had called before he found me. I helped him find the drivers he needed on the web and heard back from him the next day that everything was up and working.

A steady diet of these kinds of calls won’t put bread on the table or get baby a new pair of booties, but I was happy to help David out of a pinch. As I said, that’s why I do this job.

There is a rather famous quote for which the author is apparently unknown that says

My goal is to someday be the person my dog thinks I am.

I believe we all know viscerally what this means. Our dogs adore us and wouldn’t we all love to feel that we deserve that kind of devotion.

In life few, if any of us, live up to our own expectations for ourselves much less to those our dogs seem to mistakenly have. But it seems to me that in business, which is much less complicated and ambiguous than life in general, high standards should be achievable – but not easily and probably not within the standard business models we see today.

Bearing in mind the name and topic for this blog, let’s confine ourselves to small personal service business for now, the ideas can then be expanded from there if we want to. If we take, for example, a hypothetical computer repair business, I imagine that the owner’s dog expects that business is run with integrity. Now this word integrity can be pretty easily thrown around by people in business so maybe we should try and define it. In The Speed of Trust, Stephen M. R. Covey uses a story about Mahatma Gandhi to illustrate a definition of integrity:

At one point in his life, he was invited to speak before the House of Commons in England. Using no notes, he spoke for two hours and brought an essentially hostile audience to a rousing standing ovation. Following his speech, some reporters approached his secretary, Mahadev Desai, incredulous that Gandhi could mesmerise his audience for such a long time with no notes. Desai responded:

What Gandhi thinks, what he feels, what he says, and what he does are all the same. He does not need notes … You and I, we think one thing, feel another, say a third, and do a fourth, so we need notes and files to keep track.

OK, I admit that I’m a sucker for almost any story about Gandhi and this one is no exception. How does this apply to our business?

I believe that the average Pug or Cavalier King Charles Spaniel believes its owner speaks to his/her customer from conviction, “I’ve listened to you, I understand your problem, here is what I think should be done, here is what I will do.” All that remains then is execution.

Now, as a great man I knew used to say, “That sounds great if you say it fast”. I think you would be hard pressed to find a businessman who would say they don’t live up to this … and I think you would be equally hard pressed to find a businessman who actually does. Why? Because, alas, we are human. We fall short of our own goals, our dog’s faith and our customers’ expectations. We juggle the motivations of integrity and profit, we wrestle between confidence and competence, between pleasing our customers and our bosses. Gandhi didn’t have these problems, he notably abandoned the personal services business on the road to becoming great. Alas, we mortals are left to struggle with these issues on a daily basis.

If I have an insight from the combined wisdom of Gandhiji and my dog it is to have a bad memory. Gandhi did not memorise a bunch of great ideas, he lived a great life and spoke from his convictions, conversely, every day is a new one to my dog, he doesn’t (apparently) remember or care that yesterday I didn’t feed him on time or walk him long enough or that I did not give him the proper amount of attention. To apply this to business well, I think means to apply a certain consistency in customer interaction and a purity of purpose that ignores the profit motive but trusts that it will take care of itself.

More on this in the future.