[Info-vax] FWIW: HP to spin off PSG?

[Neil Rieck]

I am a big fan of HP PCs but something happened to me last month to
(slightly) change my mind.

Case-1

Since 2007, I have pressed many Compaq and HP branded PCs into
distributed computing projects like folding-at-home and BOINC (rosetta-
at-home, POEM-at-home, and docking-at-home).

http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/folding_at_home.html

I know these machines are not designed to run 24x7 so am not expecting
them to run without problems. But here are a few observations:

1) 50% of all switching supplies eventually die. $50 at a local supply
shop gets them back into order.

2) within 2 years all AMD machines will die. Sometimes the culprit is
the CPU and other times it is the chipset. Since it is a pain to buy a
2-3 year-old CPU, or mobo, it is better just to keep these things to
the junk pile as a source of spare parts -AND- in future, only buy
machines with Intel CPUs and Intel chipsets (believe it or not, you
can get machines with an Intel CPU but a third-party chip set).

Case-2

Last month, one of my neighbors asked me to look at their dead PC
which hosted an AMD Phenom II X4 925. This quad-core just happened to
be a 3-year-old HP Pavlion (I forget the model number) but here's the
rub: their teenager determined that the mobo fans were not running
fast enough so downloaded a BIOS update from the HP web site. He
installed the new BIOS and that was it for the mobo. Now anyone
reading this will realize you probably can't blame HP for this because
the problem was the result of some customer action.

So I opened the box to discover that the mobo in the box was made by
Pegatron while the HP site said it should be made by Gigabyte (IIRC).
I re-downloaded the BIOS update used by my neighbor and discovered (by
peeking inside the binary) that it was for not for a Pegatron.

Question: why wouldn't software from the HP web site, which was
designed for a certain target platform, first check the platform
before continuing? IMHO, this is the difference between the mature
software industry in the West vs. the newbie software industry in the
Far East. And yet, HP is to blame for not ensuring that whoever wrote
this did due diligence.  (did execs cut the budget of the group
maintaining the support site? Who knows?)

Shopping around for a replacement processor yielded no results (even
from the HP web site). However, there were a Chinese vendors on eBay
who were willing to sell me a processor-and-mobo for $140 which seemed
a little steep since the product might arrive DOA. At this point I
convinced my neighbor to allow me to take their machine to the Chinese
guy running the local PC repair shop around the corner. That guy told
me that Pegatron is a subsidiary of ASUS; they are designed in Taiwan
but manufactured in China. He also told me that big companies do this
to constantly increase annual profits.

Wow, it looks like HP just learned the lesson previously taught by
Dell. El-cheapo products with the vendor's name on it only hurt the
vendor

Neil Rieck
Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/