A heads-up on HP business desktop PCs

Michael Horowitz

Michael Horowitz wrote his first computer program in 1973 and has been a computer nerd ever since. He spent more than 20 years working in an IBM mainframe (MVS) environment. He has worked in the research and development group of a large Wall Street financial company, and has been a technical writer for a mainframe software company.

He teaches a large range of self-developed classes, the underlying theme being Defensive Computing. Michael is an independent computer consultant, working with small businesses and the self-employed. He can be heard weekly on The Personal Computer Show on WBAI.

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Michael Horowitz

April 8, 2008 10:00 p.m. PT

If you are considering buying an HP desktop computer, especially a low end business model, be sure to read this story, HP aggravates its failure rate, by Ed Foster, longtime author of the Gripe Line column/blog in InfoWorld.

The story involves a business that ordered 24 HP DX2200 desktop machines (since discontinued) and suffered four motherboard failures, two dead hard drives, and another hard drive "on the brink of failure". Beyond these hardware problems, I found the account of dealing with HP most interesting. No doubt, many of us can relate.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.