waffle

I recently had the privilege of setting up an HP laptop out of the box for someone. I’ve done this a few months ago with a similar model, and the out-of-the-box experience was so abysmal that I braced myself this time around. It would turn out that I was right to do so.

Here is an abridged list of what I had to endure:

• I’m asked to select one of three nordic language versions of Vista, followed by lengthy hard drive activity and restarts (probably copying of this setup to another partition). Note that they already know what I’m going to choose here: Swedish, Norwegian and Danish all have different keyboard layouts, and the laptop came with the correct keyboard. This is time-and-money-saving laziness on HP’s part.
• Vista installation ensues. I actually like Vista’s installation, and this step was relatively fast.
• Vista configuration ensues.
• Vista “hardware optimization” ensues — this is the driver installation/Windows Experience Index assessment stage.
• Now an HP tool tells me that it’s creating a backup partition. This takes several minutes, has a completely unhelpful progress bar (during the last stage, it sat at 0% for five solid minutes) and not only not a remaining time estimate, but in its place instead an “elapsed time” counter. Way to make this slow step feel slower.
• After all this, here comes the droves of HP crapware, installed with, “helpfully”, no interaction whatsoever. Uninstall programs, here we come.
• Finally, registration in a really weird window, taking up the full width, but only about 60% of the window (aligned to the top, not centered, natch). And of course, it’s not mentioned how to skip this step. (Or maybe it is: at this point I’m so winded from the barrage of weird, inconsistently styled HP dialog boxes that I skimmed this one, but I sure didn’t see anything like it.) Our old friend Alt+F4 works to exit.

Total elapsed time: 55 minutes. In contrast, all Macs I’ve set up have been usable within 10 minutes, discounting transferring information from an old computer, an option which isn’t even offered here. But this isn’t about Macs, it’s about respecting your customers.

The battery wasn’t in its slot already but helpfully attached as part of the “random crap” box; the “BTO” RAM wasn’t already installed (although this might simply be a problem with the dealer); I still haven’t gotten the Intel stickers off (the “warning: using a keyboard without the proper ergonomic training may cause your genitals to fall off in spectacular ways” sticker came off, for what it’s worth) and of course the installation took about 45 minutes too long because the geniuses at HP can’t prepare a fucking Ghost image.

This is HP’s fault. I quite enjoy most of the Vista setup which is way better optimized than XP setup in asking the right questions in one go. Most of what was weird, took time, felt unnerving, lacked in usability and was completely useless from a technical standpoint clearly came from HP.

Team HP is betting on you taking your day off when you want a new computer. And it’s true that it already as a rule takes a while to transfer everything over from your old computer to your new computer. But that’s an impetus to make the out-of-box experience as short and as smooth as possible, not an excuse to waste another hour of your time. That’s just being a complete, if perhaps slightly more profitable, ass.