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HP says I should have known its £399 laptop bargain was too good to be true
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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They have awful support. They build machines that are prone to overheating, their servers are second to Dell (who have considerably better support), there's a lot about HP not to appreciate.
As a friend of sysadmins I hear horror stories of HP server racks and I hear most shops running with Dell enterprise plans both for laptops and servers.
Their stuff also seemed so cheap and non-robust :(
I have my share of issues with Dells, but the last HP machine I had killed itself through fan failure and overheating.
My Dells tend to break to wear and tear from me being not so gentle with them - I think I've had two Dells that had hinge issues, but that's not as major as an overheating problem.
I would buy an Acer before I got anywhere near anything by HP. I don't Envy their product people
I see what you did there.
I know acer is pretty shit, but in 2019 I was looking for an all-amd gaming laptop, and there were two whole options in the entire (new) market: one from acer, or one from asus. The Acer had better specs, prices were somewhat similar, so I sat on it. 6mo later, it drops from 2.7k to 1.4k and I jump. I wanted a mobile gaming machine to be similar to my desktop threadripper build. It was decently close.
Support is shit at L1 but if you get a L2 rep, they actually know wtf you're on about and are very helpful (my display had very visible edge backlight bleed, a second panel too. third was perfect.). I had bought the extended warranty + on-site repair, not trusting depot techs. Shouldn't have been needed, but I wanted the machine, properly.
Would I do it again? If I had to (if only a couple amd cpu and gpu options exist). The speakers are trash, the screen bezel is literally an inch in all directions, it gulps 300W from the wall when gaming, the system can't run full-bore on the battery (gtav, maxed out, unplug and 45fps becomes ~3 and after a couple seconds becomes hard powered off). There is only 1 NVMe slot while the Intel version has 2 (second is sata m2 for the amd). There was never any gpu driver updates from acer, and the official ones cause screen corruption after waking from sleep, forcing the use of hibernation. But still, it's a desktop 2700, a desktop Vega 56 (though power limited), it's fans could send a man to the moon, it can have 64gb ram, 1nvme, 1 sata m2, and 1 2.5" sata drive, and it's all user accessible. And as a bonus, you can kill someone by clobbering them over the head with it, at like ~8 pounds and ~19 inches diagonal, 1"+ thick.
So I want to hate it, and I don't love it, but damn it is a beast of a machine, from acer, which up until then I saw as complete dogshit machines. There's at least one person working in their Predator line that actually cares about a good user experience. I won't be recommending them for all but the most edge-cases... but for the edge-cases, it's alright.
Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
But I get your point
This wasn't even a customized machine though - it was off the (Amazon) shelf, just really high-end for the time. Afaik they didn't offer any variants with more ram or storage. Just Intel or amd, with nVidia or amd. You got more storage with the Intel version, and the second slot as NVMe, but that was it.
The asus was likely a better built machine, but as being one-or-the-other, specs trumped niceties.
E: also lol you posted this like 6 times
Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
But I get your point
Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
But I get your point
Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
But I get your point
Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
But I get your point
Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
But I get your point
Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
But I get your point
Yeah, like anyone can specc out a beast of a machine to compensate for poor build quality and othet qulity of life stuff but I just value a more coherent and organic total package. Also aesthetically, I value that as well since I don't have any need for a beast. M1 seems toget the job done no matter what I throw at it.
But I get your point
I'm one such sysadmin. I have to work with HP products and HP-by-another-name L3 switches. They are not exaggerating. We've had brand new server power supplies crap out on the first power-up. Intermittent outages are a weekly event. Sometimes HP devices refuse to talk to the network because we looked at them wrong. I'm hoping to finally move all of our services to a Dell server over the winter. Then the HPs will be sacrificed to the old gods.
Got a pair of old HPE gen8 1U servers that are chewing through fan packages like nobody's business, replaced at least five burnt-out fans on them in a similar amount of years.
We're running a mix of HPE, Dell, and Fujitsu servers and they all absolutely suck in their individual ways - HP(E) adds a bunch of arbitrary hardware limitations which we have to work around, Dell intentionally degrades our multi-system setups with firmware updates, and Fujitsu's boot firmware goes absolutely pants-on-head retarded if you're doing netboot first.
We've gotten some Supermicro systems now as well, and they've been a real treat in comparison, though their software UX feels like it's about two decades behind.
I'd stay away from their storage solutions and network gear as well. They are trash.