bad experience with vista and compaq

I do not know the relevance this has to this space but then I hope that whoever is reading this will find something useful.

My experience goes like this. I came into possession of a new Compaq desktop computer through the kindness of a dear friend. It is a Presario.

It came with 256 RAM, dvd rom and Vista starter. Even without a burner, the price I must say is something which was most attractive. For an addition over the original price, an extra 256 RAM was added, something which, as we shall see, was not so smart.

My troubles began when the computer started hanging. Just when I thought that it had finally had even fun testing my patience, I found the system does not allow access to some websites, in particular msn.

What next? I resorted to calling the service center which, as anyone who has dialed 300 or 800 numbers, is quite an exercise in patience and futility. Good fortune smiled and my call did get picked up. Unfortunately it was not a specialist but a stand-in who promised he will get my troubles through to a specialist who will attend to my troubles, pronto! He said I will be receiving a call back. It was 5pm then. I was impressed. But not for long.

The call never came. Many calls followed to be greeted by the talking machine on the other end. I did learn though that they do have a soft spot for us frustrated callers. This they do by surprising us with the various ways to make you hold on to the line without a clue as to what is happening on the other end. They could all be having a party while your patience ticks away and your phone bill escalates.

Thank heavens, finally a kind Indian accented soul on the other end picked up my call. He was kind and let on that I am not the first one with such problems. I forgot to mention that I got so fed up with the vista that i formatted it with the old trusty windows xp. I should also confess my stupidity for not backing up the vista.

Back to this kind Indian soul. He gave me a number to call which he said is the kl service center number. It is. But that is the beginning of another round of talking machines, hung calls and promises. To cut a long story short, after promises made by the service staff, I wrote them off but this after having learnt that I have to fork out more money to get an upgrade, that this new computer does not support the old xp, that my ram is in no way sufficient to run vista anyway.

Many questions are left lingering. Why sell a computer that is deficient for basic use? By basic simply mean that it does not hang, that it is internet usable, can do simple word processing and spreadsheet. Basic does not mean that we take the thing home to find that it cannot handle simple task but need to spend more and more money to get to level one.

You draw your own conclusion but BEWARE!