David L. Gehrt wrote:
For the past couple of months I have been having intermittent, serious problems with my firewall/gateway machine which have disrupted my network (especially email) which caused me to get suspended from this list. The end result was the replacement with an unused system which then suffered a catastrophic disk failure, and resulted in my purchase of my first complete system from a major vendor, HP. Before this acquisition I spent the past 20 years getting parts from Fry's and other Bay Area stores, and assembling systems on my own. When I tried to register the hardware I had some problems relating to the failure of Internet access to an HP computer system. I called the tech support line to do the thing, but I aborted this call when I was told by a tech support person AND his supervisor that I would be ineligible for tech support because about the first thing I did with the system was blow away Vista and installed Fedora Linux (FC6, not F7 or F8). I am interested in discovering whether others have heard of this crap and how people were able to deal with this issue.
I've had an HP laptop for a long time and have had a lot of problems with it. Regardless, every time I would bring it in for service, I would format the HD or put in a blank one. They never complained.
Note: I had a CompUSA warranty - which basically meant they take care of shipping & such and warranty was extended by a few years. This is not really relevant in this case, though.
