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HP Customer Support Fail… Again

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know I’ve had bad luck with HP for years, including my current computer’s hard drive blowing up only weeks after I bought it.  Well, about a year ago, I bought a 2TB removable hard drive for my HP desktop. Well, not surprisingly, it has been making strange sounds for the last few weeks, and a few days ago, it died. Boy, HP sure makes good stuff.

Not to worry. I know HP’s excellent customer service will help me with expert help. In case you didn’t catch that, I’m being sarcastic.

First, I Google the drive I bought a year ago, only to find out that HP no longer makes it. To rub salt in the wound, about 6 months ago, HP had a blow out for this drive for $118 (after promo code) on their website, which still comes up in the Google searches.

The closest thing HP has left on their website is a different 2TB external drive. From the picture, I cannot tell if it will fit inside my HP Pavilion m9450f.

HP USB 3.0 2TB Personal Media External Drive

So before I order my drive, I sent out this email to HP’s wonderful customer service, pre-sale department, shown below:

“I previously (9/2010) bought the HP 2TB Personal Media Drive (Product #BK229AA#ABA) that fits inside my HP Pavilion m9450f desktop.The drive broke after only 1 year so now I want to replace it. I do not see the same drive online. Is the HP USB 3.0 2TB Personal Media External Drive (part # BR389AA#ABA) the same and more importantly, will it fit inside my desktop?

The yellow highlighting was not in the email I sent. It’s just to show that I was concerned about how it would fit inside my computer. HP customer service sent back this following email:

“Please know that, the HP USB 3.0 2TB Personal Media External Drive is designed to work with any PC through USB 2.0 and the new USB 3.0 interface. It is compatible with any USB-enabled PC; backward-compatible with PCs that have USB 2.0 operating on Windows XP 32, Windows Vista 32, Windows 7 32/64. And yes, it will fit with your HP Pavilion m9450f desktop pc.

Notice the wording in their email:  “fit with” and not “fit inside.” I should have red flagged this and asked again for clarification. But being the trusting person that I am, and the fact that I’ve had such good luck with HP customer service, I just went ahead and bought the drive.

There seems to be some type of language barrier here. This kind of reminds me of the excellent customer service I got from Hell, I mean Dell… where I almost had to kill somebody and the level of incompetence made me wonder how they can survive.

But I digress.

To make the story short (too late), when I got the unit in a few days, while I was opening the package, I already realized that this drive would NOT fit in my HP computer. Big surprise. Oh no. Now I have to return this thing.

Instead of being a dummy like when I called Dell and was on the phone from 4:30pm to almost 7pm, I used the live chat online to talk to HP via the Internet. I got somebody on there within 2 minutes and in a “mere” 14 minutes, got the RMA# and instructions on how to return the unwanted drive. They certainly are very good at taking care of returns. They are going to refund me the entire amount, even including the overnight FedEx charge. At least they’re good at something.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t solve my problem. I still need this discontinued drive from somewhere. Ebay here I come.