This is really interesting…
Laura Breeden bought a new Compaq Presario C304NR notebook in January. She bought it because she wanted to get rid of Windows and all the malware that surrounds it and move to Linux, and her old laptop lacked the memory and power to run Ubuntu Edgy. The salespeople assured her that the C304NR was “Linux ready.” But they didn’t tell her that running Linux would void her warranty.
Until recently, she’s been happy with it, and with Ubuntu Edgy. But a couple of weeks ago she began having keyboard problems. The keyboard is misbehaving when she begins to type quickly: keys are sticking and the space bar does not always respond when pressed.
When she called Compaq — the unit comes with a one-year warranty on the hardware — they asked what operating system she was running. When she told them Linux, they said, “Sorry, we do not honor our hardware warranty when you run Linux.” In order to get warranty service, she was told, she would have to remove Linux and reinstall the original OS.
Laura is not a software engineer, but she failed to see how her choice of operating system could damage the keyboard.
Can you say ridiculous? I mean, it’s one thing if she called in and said she couldn’t get her trackpad to work a certain way under Ubuntu, but to wholesale ignore her issue (which is obviously hardware and not software related) just because she chose to run Linux boggles my mind. Apparently, a PR person at HP isn’t so convinced this makes sense either.
The PR rep told me, after wading through all the terms and conditions attached to the notebook’s warranty, that “it is impossible to anticipate every single issue that a customer can face, so the terms and conditions of warranties can’t list every possible scenario. Usually if a customer installs a different OS, it has a big impact on the PC and will void the warranty. However, since the OS couldn’t have been responsible for keys sticking on a notebook keyboard, I think this is an exception to the rule.” She also asserts that Compaq’s “warranty terms and conditions are in line with the rest of the industry.”
The warranty terms are definitely in line with the rest of the industry, but that certainly doesn’t make them right. The simple fact is that her keyboard failed. If she was running no OS whatsoever, her keyboard still failed, and someone at HP needs to help this woman out.
The author of this article also goes on some tirade about Microsoft and its tentacles being hooked into manufacturers in a profound way. The fact is that even when you want to change your laptop over from XP to Vista, manufacturers won’t help you if you don’t buy that MS OS from them (see this Consumerist post for an interesting story to that effect).
Either way, manufacturers need to stop sending their support to low-paid morons in India and start actually supporting their customers. Injecting common sense into the departments that deal with customers would be a good place to start.