Anthony Elrod says:

Instead of a review, I’m including an abridged version of a letter I sent to Mr Mark Hurd, the President of Hewlett Packard

Dear Mr. Hurd, On April 27 at 2 PM I received a Pavilion Elite Desktop that was defective and “dead in the box.” I’ve been buying computers since 1992 and can accept this but not what followed. (Repair Order #803………)

From 6 PM to midnight I talked to people in India whose English was barely intelligible making the process extremely difficult. They had me doing tests over and over and sitting on endless hold in between. This was incompetence. Around midnight I was asked to do a “System Restore?” and told by your Tech he would call back—he never did and I was to find that this is common.

On April 28, convinced that the problem was beyond the abilities of your offshore people and not wanting to go back to people I couldn’t understand, who never called me back, and who put me on endless hold; I requested (per your guarantee) someone to make a housecall here in Seattle, which was denied. I tried to access American support to no avail and ended up calling Sales–at least they spoke English. They essentially told me “I was on my own” and I thought of the phrase–”Abandon hope all ye who enter here”

On April 29 I got your Filipino station and repeated the same process for hours. One particularly grating aspect was listening ad nausea to your parroted message about being able to get home service while I languished on endless hold. This is deceptive and a rotten lie. My machine was brand new—-a fact that wasn’t even noticed by your techs until the third day. After 20 hrs of my personal time had been chewed up, the dead machine was finally pronounced unfit and carted back by FedEx on April 30.

On May 1, in one final exhaustive attempt to throw salt in my wounds, I received an email double charging me, and my Visa card was billed an extra $50 to boot. Come on Mr. Hurd, you are a great big Fortune 500 company, how hard is it to fix these things…..things I would expect if this was a David Packard startup in his Palo Alto garage. Best Regards A—- E—-

Post Script—Yes there is a post script to all this. Hewlett-Packard again sent me a brand new machine—machine #2. After the initial setup, I couldn’t get on the Internet. Once again I called your techs in India (Repair order #——858—-). After about 5 hours, including a “face to face” and the usual endless tests, I went to bed. Since I wasn’t willing to spend another 20 hours on the phone I sent the machine back for a refund. Two bad machines in a row strains the credulity and the bounds of coincidence, but your people were merely sanguine about it all.

The original deal was that I gave HP a price they advertised and they gave me an operational Core i7 machine or they would come out and do an in-house repair. I felt cheated. I got my money back but lost 25+hours of my personal time. Hewlett Packard is a good example of a giant global faceless octopus of a company with ubiquitous advertising, cheap prices and shoddy rubbish products. One of the sales guys told me that if HP used American techs it would add $400 to each machine—-so that’s why Apples cost more?! Believe me Mr. Hurd, gone are the days I’ll do business with HP again.
Rating: 1 / 5

Michael Gilly says:

THIS REVIEW IS FOR THE HPE-235F.

I was considering building my own PC, but I decided to go with this model because of the value. I also sell computers at a national retailer, so I can usually judge if a computer is the best buy.

This computer is almost worth every cent. I would only recommend getting this much computer if you really need this much. A lot of people overpurchase for what they need. If you game, I can tell you it will run Source games at max settings at 1080p and most other games will run on high/max settings.

The speed is unmatched. It has a 6-core processor that was just released (when I bought it) less than a month ago. However, this does have some flaws. HP doesn’t have a support page up for it yet.

I did notice that the hard drive is 5400RPM, a Western Digital Green series. That is terrible that HP would make such a powerful computer and skim on the hard drive. I replaced it with a 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda. I didn’t take a star off because when I opened up the computer, I noticed the RAM was DDR3-10600 instead of the DDR3-8500 that HP’s website says the computer holds. So I won and lost. At least a hard drive is cheaper than RAM!
Rating: 5 / 5