Vomit Box: A lesson learned
- Thread starter Mercutio
- Start date
Sol
Storage is cool
As was stated in the journal HP actually have a reputation for quality in some circles. I know this is true, I've spoken to people who have actually bought HPs for that reason, what I don't understand is exactly how they managed this...
I think I realised that HP were total garbage in the early to mid 90s, they may well have been pretty bad before that but I couldn't really be expected to pick that up since what do primary school students know about value for money computing...
Since then I have worked on a fair few HP machines and even had to call HP support once or twice, not to mention work directly with HP system administrators, DBAs and network engineers as a part of my application programming/support work. My opinion of the competence of your average HP employee has only ever gotten worse.
Whenever I come across someone who is thinking of buying anything from HP I will tend to go to some lengths to talk them out of it to the point that I have to physically restrain myself if I overhear a salesperson in a department store trying to sell anything HP to some unsuspecting techno-illiterate.
To cut a long rant short(er) how can even the best of advertising and review purchasing campaigns make up for the thousands of experienced anti-HP zealots that the company has managed to produce over the years?
I mean sure HP's PC division may not make any money anymore, but it's a staggering statement for human stupidity that the division can still exist...
I think I realised that HP were total garbage in the early to mid 90s, they may well have been pretty bad before that but I couldn't really be expected to pick that up since what do primary school students know about value for money computing...
Since then I have worked on a fair few HP machines and even had to call HP support once or twice, not to mention work directly with HP system administrators, DBAs and network engineers as a part of my application programming/support work. My opinion of the competence of your average HP employee has only ever gotten worse.
Whenever I come across someone who is thinking of buying anything from HP I will tend to go to some lengths to talk them out of it to the point that I have to physically restrain myself if I overhear a salesperson in a department store trying to sell anything HP to some unsuspecting techno-illiterate.
To cut a long rant short(er) how can even the best of advertising and review purchasing campaigns make up for the thousands of experienced anti-HP zealots that the company has managed to produce over the years?
I mean sure HP's PC division may not make any money anymore, but it's a staggering statement for human stupidity that the division can still exist...
Sol said:
I think the engineering/math/physics crowd used to think very highly of HP calculators.
Also, many, many people used to think very highly of HP laser printers. And I suspect most of those that had exposure to them also thought highly of HP's high volume impact printers.
I'm going to guess that otherwise intelligent people still think about the products they used to see back in the 1980's when they hear the name HP. That means they've made two mistakes of course: 1) companies change, and 2) a company that does well at one thing doesn't necessarily do well at another.
Sol
Storage is cool
Your probably right, although I would add to that the absence of reputable computer based paper publications.
In Australia at least every computer magazine I've come across, regardless of it's original intent or integrity, has ended up with glowing reviews of terrible products with a facing full page add from the same company, within a year or two of the first issue...
I do have to admit that 1980's-90's HP laser printers were very good, I still have an old one I got from Tony that almost still works.
It's odd how companies do manage to vary so much even in very similar fields. Lexmarks high end laser printers seem to be very well put together machines for example, whilst thier low end gear is perhaps the most horrendous rubbish I've ever had the misforrtune to come in contact with...
In Australia at least every computer magazine I've come across, regardless of it's original intent or integrity, has ended up with glowing reviews of terrible products with a facing full page add from the same company, within a year or two of the first issue...
I do have to admit that 1980's-90's HP laser printers were very good, I still have an old one I got from Tony that almost still works.
It's odd how companies do manage to vary so much even in very similar fields. Lexmarks high end laser printers seem to be very well put together machines for example, whilst thier low end gear is perhaps the most horrendous rubbish I've ever had the misforrtune to come in contact with...
It is the mass market that produces junk because the empathis is always on cost and nothing else: because that is what sells. This pattern seems to occur in all products and with all companies.
When one starts looking at quality, it always costs more and unlkess you are looking for disposible, isn't it always worth it? HP made a big name for itself, for decades, bulding quality stuff at high prices and making money at it. It is only when it started competing for the mass market in computers, did quality issues creep into their reputation. Vomit boxes and Compaq are now in HP's blood and they are suffering because of it.
When one starts looking at quality, it always costs more and unlkess you are looking for disposible, isn't it always worth it? HP made a big name for itself, for decades, bulding quality stuff at high prices and making money at it. It is only when it started competing for the mass market in computers, did quality issues creep into their reputation. Vomit boxes and Compaq are now in HP's blood and they are suffering because of it.
Will Rickards
Storage Is My Life
When HP first introduced desktop lines to places like circuit city and best buy, I was there as a salesman. Those machines were good. But a couple years later they were replaced with vomit boxes. Same can be said of sony vaio's.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Someone brought me a Compaq CQ-2713 this morning. I haven't seen a box this vomit-y in ages. They wanted to install a second internal hard drive and couldn't figure out how. I figured it was probably going to be one of those deals where the guy wanted to put an old IDE drive in a new desktop, but that wasn't the case.
It's in a mini-tower case, but the motherboard inside is a proprietary mini-ITX form factor with neither PCI nor PCIe slots, exactly two SATA ports (in a large-ish mini-tower with a couple open drive bays) and a DC power PSU with an external transformer much like a laptop would have. And the hard drive that's in the chassis is a 2.5" 5400rpm drive with an adapter. The whole desktop weighs about 5lbs.
The thing that's blowing my mind about this is the fact that somebody went out of their way to make an miniITX board that's so far from standards-conforming and then took the time to stuff it in a desktop-type case instead of some kind of SFF setup.
The other thing I notice is that the default software load of Win7 included neither Java nor a PDF reader.
Truth be told, I don't know if java is still relevant for desktop web browsing, given the security issues that surround it, but it's interesting to me that, while Adobe AIR and Flash were installed, Acrobat wasn't.
It's in a mini-tower case, but the motherboard inside is a proprietary mini-ITX form factor with neither PCI nor PCIe slots, exactly two SATA ports (in a large-ish mini-tower with a couple open drive bays) and a DC power PSU with an external transformer much like a laptop would have. And the hard drive that's in the chassis is a 2.5" 5400rpm drive with an adapter. The whole desktop weighs about 5lbs.
The thing that's blowing my mind about this is the fact that somebody went out of their way to make an miniITX board that's so far from standards-conforming and then took the time to stuff it in a desktop-type case instead of some kind of SFF setup.
The other thing I notice is that the default software load of Win7 included neither Java nor a PDF reader.
Truth be told, I don't know if java is still relevant for desktop web browsing, given the security issues that surround it, but it's interesting to me that, while Adobe AIR and Flash were installed, Acrobat wasn't.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
No way to add an internal drive at all, sort of splitting off an external USB port and running a cable inside the case. There weren't even extra internal USB headers.
I thought we had moved past systems like that, or at least started putting them in boxes where no one would think they could be expanded.
I thought we had moved past systems like that, or at least started putting them in boxes where no one would think they could be expanded.
Chewy509
Wotty wot wot.
Certainly that what it sounds like. I know a while ago here in Oz, Compaq was selling some small SFFs about the size of a largish thin client (slightly bigger than the HP T1010 thin clients), and those were based on either an Intel Atom or an AMD C-60 setup. This is PC that Merc has, has an AMD E-300, I would certainly not rule that out.
Mind you, the only Compaq PC (desktop size) we get here is the CQ-3300 series (Athlon X2 or Intel Core 2 Duo based), and from the user manuals they both appear to be microATX based, and they both have 4x SATA connectors on board, except the case only has a single internal 3.5" bay, but strangely enough has 2x 5.25" bays?