Some 50 years ago Hewlett-Packard was a respectable electronics company. Today it is primarily a reseller of electronics manufactured in the Far East. Some of the electronics are poorly designed due to overwhelming concern with the company's bottom line. In April 2001 I bought a HP Pavilion XL 848 computer in Sam's Club in Maine. I paid about $1100 for it. The computer consisted of an AMD ATHLON 850Hz processor on ASUS GLAS motherboard, 128 Mb RAM, 40 Gb Fujitsu HD, HP CD writer, HP CD reader, combination modem & sound card, HP mouse, HP keyboard.
The computer was not even tested in Maine but hand-carried to Hilo, HI, where it was used by a member of my family. It worked OK till about May 2002 when it developed several intermittent problems in the motherboard ports to peripheral devices (mouse, keyboard). Whenever such problems occured, the user switched from the PS/2 and serial connectors to USB and it appeared that that fixed the problem (temporarily - for about three weeks). Later the modem and the sound card (that combo card is in my opinion a no-no combination) stopped to work. However there was no great need for sound and the modem was replaced by a serial external modem.
Another lease on life albeit only few weeks long. Soon both serial ports began to malfunction also. The user inquired about HP authorized repair service and found out that there was not a single one on the Big Island. I also made some inquiries and learned that the computer is past the warranty date. However I obtained one valuable advice from the HP help-line: "Get yourself a replacement computer". This was not entirely to my liking as I was not yet ready to throw 1100 Dollars into a dumpster. So I asked the user to send the computer back to Maine. When it arrived I could not resist to test it and to my surprise it worked again all right - that is, for about three weeks. At almost the same time we received a notice from the HP company saying that the Fujitsu Hard drive is defective and should be replaced by a Samsung 60Gb hard drive. Indeed the HP advice was correct; few days later the 40 Gb Fujitsu HD crashed. So we replaced the Fujitsu with Samsung and this appeared to solve all problems. The computer was tested for about two weeks and then was shipped back to Hilo, HI. However, after about a month in Hilo, the same old intermittent motherboard port problems reappeared. Eventually it got so bad that it stopped working altogether.
At this point I suggested that the computer undergoes a fourth voyage back to Maine. After its arrival I examined it very carefully. I became convinced that the problem is with the ASUS GLAS motherboard. So I bought a new motherboard (MSI), new soundcard (CREATIVE), and attempted to load the HP&WIN-ME software into the Samsung HD. However, there I run into a different, more serious problem. The HP&WIN-ME software would not load. It left me hanging with the admonition that my repaired HP computer is not an HP computer. I am absolutely certain that the hardware on the repaired computer is good because it runs with a different MSOS system (which I had to purchase) and it also runs with Linux on a MAXTOR hard drive.
I am willing to accept the fact that sometime I buy lemons and I take full responsibility for it. The HP mouse was a lemon, the modem was a lemon, the sound card was a lemon, the motherboard was a lemon and the hard drive was a lemon. They are all dead now and the HP keyboard is real pain. But all this goes under the heading of injuries and one has to live with that especially since the warranty period is over. But the fact that I cannot load the operating system into the computer that I have repaired at my cost is an insult and a theft. And I will not accept it. The fact that HP hardware is defective, the power supply weak and the case more suitable to a boudoir than to an office cannot invalidate the OS software that was bundled with the HP computer. You have a case that is untenable before any court in the world where common sense prevails.
Sincerely