While it's little consolation, XP would just glide onto good hardware. A real problem for people is that XP doesn't check out the hardware for you or cough up any meaningful error for you to know what is amiss.
Your post is devoid of any error message that the forum could use to hint at what to replace next so I'm left with only a few suggestions:
1. Be calm. HP has not done you a disfavor that I read here. The honeymoon of the warranty is over and now you may have to have the machine repaired.
2. Think about what was added/changed since the machine was acquired. The HP restore CDs may trip over that and not install.
3. Not everyone can repair a PC. Not everyone will buy memory sticks, hard disks, CDROM units or motherboards. This is where the service centers do their thing.
4. Get the estimates up front. And 100 bucks to estimate how much to repair is simply a rip-off unless said estimate is "firm." I agree that for a "firm" estimate, they might have to really spend the time. The looser the estimate, the lower the fee for the look-see. Very easy to understand this one.
5. Don't spend too much on repair. New spiffy Centrino laptops are under 1K. New desktops are under 500 (price of a repair).
Bob
I have a HP Pavilion 523w with a Pentium4 2.0 GHz/400, 512 ram and 80gig HD. The computer went out of warranty and three weeks later I couldn't boot up, it would get to the windows logo and then lock up on a black screen.The only thing I could do at that point was get into safe mode.
I called HP and they had me do a destructive system recovery which screwed up my system even more,I then couldn't even get into safe mode. Then they sent me 2 sets of recovery cds and 2 different recovery console cds. I followed everything they told me to do with the cds and it would get to the windows logo with a please wait on it. I waited and waited and nothing happened at all. Atthat point I went and got an XP cd and tried to do a clean install and it moves very slow and takes forever. After about 12 hours it gets to completing installation with 23 minutes remaining and will not go any further.
I called HP again for the 10th time and they said it NOW sounds like a hard drive problem, that it is bad. So I replaced the hard drive and tried the recovery cds first and the same thing happened with the please wait and then a tried another clean install with the XP cd and I have been sitting at 23 minutes remaining for 12 hours now.
I can't get any support from HP for this problem, Mircrosoft won't help either. I have searched all over the web for any kind of help but nothing works. I am at my wits end.
Any help anyone could give me would be very much appreciated. Thank you in advance for any help.
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