First off, do you have any idea how frustrating and humiliating it is as a tech to go crying to the idiots in India that are trained more on their English skills than their skills with the computer when you're a computer repair technician yourself? It's pretty horrible. Anyways, here's my story:
I got this laptop for only $300. Great deal and all that. I get it and it has Vista Home Basic. Not wanting to put up with that, I decide to format it, remove the recovery partition, and put on Vista Ultimate. Then I go to find the drivers......GeeZeus! There are none! I went directly to the manufacturer and all they have is some WIFI driver that won't even install. So I'm missing like 10 drivers now and I'm just screwed. So that's when I do a live chat with the support people.
They tell me that it's my fault the drivers aren't working and I shouldn't have removed Vista Basic. Tell me.....how is it my fault you don't even have the drivers up on your website?! They say that "HP does not recommend using retail software on their computers due to the difficulty of finding drivers". WTF!? So when I want to upgrade this computer to Windows 7 you're telling me I shouldn't because it's not the OS that came with my computer? What world are you people living in?!
So anyways, he eventually tells me about a secret FTP fileserver that only they have access to and tells me he'll find the drivers for my laptop on there. He gets back with the drivers and I install them. I tell him goodbye and get a case # so I can speak to someone else about the problem if this doesn't work. Of course I reboot and NONE of the drivers he gave me did anything. God, I'm steaming mad by now. The laptop has been out for 4 WHOLE MONTHS and they still don't have the drivers for it up on their website!!!!!!
So I had to use a combination of Driver Genius, HP's "Software Update" tool, and a driver made for a similar (but not identical) computer that I've taken apart and patched to the best of my ability. I still don't know if this will work yet. Hopefully the only thing I'll have no drivers for will be some weirdo bluetooth thing that I'll never use anyway. Wish me luck guys. After this I'm writing a formal complaint to HP about this matter.
