Why do i have to pay for technical support?Follow

why do you need a warranty to call a pc company to fix a minor problem? I have an hp pavilion entertainment pc. I had it for 2 years then the warranty expired. After it expired the pc had a major virus issue I could not resolve so I did a factory recovery with hp's Recovory manager program that is supose to reset the pc to the conndition software wise as when I purchased it.

However after I did the recovory the BD-Rom BC-5501s ATA optical drive would not run or even recognize Blu-ray discs. Its Firmware version shows as fm 1.82, driver version 6.0.6001.18000 and driver date 6/21/2006. I cant find any newer versions of fm or drivers, and hp support for this problem is none existant, Unless I pay tech support for a year of support for $99 or perincident of $64 which is only good for 14 days (they wouldnt even answer my question when I asked if the fm and driver version was up to date).

I paid for a 2 year warranty that i never used cause there were no issues durring that time. If i had the pc for 2 years with no problems then paying $99 or even $64 for 1 problem is a bit expensive, most likely I wont have any more issues after that considering how long i had the pc before 1 problem occured.

In my opinion the people that run the pc corporations should stop buying dozens of $60,000.00 suits, an 80,000,000,00 lear jet for every board member, $350,000.00 cars, and taking the whole family out to eat a $6000.00 meal 3 times a day, and start putting some of that money back into customer support, care, and satisfaction.

I take it the concept of a business is foreign to you?

How long do you expect them to continue spending the money to train people on the specifics of a product that they aren't selling anymore? 5 years, 10? How much did that 2 year warranty cost you?

And who are you to tell someone else how to live? It's their money, they can spend it however they want.

Most box PC's don't come with disc's anymore. Recovery data is on the partition of the hard drive. Idea being, you recover to get it base-lined and then get on the web and download any further drivers you need. I personally hate box PC's as the recovery is usually loaded down with junk programs installed by HP/Dell/etc. Problems come up when you attempt to un-install those (HP really bad about that, Sony too). I know back in the MS Xp days, you normally would get instructions telling you to make a recovery set of disks before using the PC. Not sure now with Vista/Win7, since I build any PCs I need for myself. At work, any PC that takes a crap gets wiped and reloaded with a standard configuration that only includes basic features anyway. No hunting for drivers there, plus if it is completely dead...recycle. Our PCs are dirt cheap.

Point being, crack the case and remove the disk drive and see the make/model of the optical drive. Get on the web and look up the drivers/firmware, it is really that easy.

Take it back to Walmart and buy a real computer?

5m is the starting price for one, not the top end. If you're on a budget you can buy used for 2-4m

the only firmware update I found so far is for a Sony Optiarc BD ROM BC-5501S-H​2 1.86. is there a difference between BD ROM BC-5501S and BD ROM BC-5501S-hr? I found that at the site below.

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware/Sony-Optiarc-BD-ROM-BC-5501S-H2-FIRMWARE-Update/td-p/964241

Isn't that why he's here?

I will do support for free, it will be horrible horrible advice but you get what you pay for.

I'm only here because I'm doing a boot scan on another PC and I can't do anything much until it completes.

Think I might have to reformat, but that's life.

Ironically the tech support forum answering duties are all volunteer. I get my regular admin pay, sure, but answering those tech support questions has no bearing on how much I get paid. I answer them for three reasons.

One, Computers are a hobby of mine. it happens to be my other job to interact with them, and I think I have a fairly decent track record on computer repair advice.

Two, The tech support forum is a large google search draw to the site. People looking for answers to specific game problems will often see our results first, hopefully find their answer, and then realize "hey, there's a forum here, i should post more!" and increase traffic or at least lurkership. How successful that has been, I have no real way to judge, but I do know that particular forum sees more anonymous viewers than many of the other forums.

Three, I want to make sure we have a place for people to go and see how to protect their computers from viruses, and understand that we have a technical competancy about viruses and virus prevention and are likely to be able to recognize an infection in our banner ads sooner rather than later if one ever does occur, and at the very least that we take them very seriously.

They didn't want a tech support forum at first. I had to lobby for it for about 4 months. I think it has turned out pretty nice for an afterthought forum though. I usually don't mind answering tech support questions in there. Its only the ones where the users come off as demanding or as being kind of jerks towards support technicians in general that I generally ignore. I do some side tech support after hours for profit in the local area here aside from my main job, mainly specializing in virus repair / reload etc. $65/hr is actually a pretty good deal for that kind of thing. It's kind of like being a plumber. You get to deal with the worst of the worst in terms of viruses and infection vectors, and it isn't steady everyday work. Plus, the ones who are really good at it and are worth the higher rates tend to not bill as many hours fixing things in the first place. Lately I've been branching out to fixing some PC issues remotely via the free teamviewer.com application. I bought the corporate license, etc. That works suprisingly well for fixing many smaller issues, though you have to be careful to not trip the network stack and lose connectivity, so there are definitly limits to what you can do. But fixing driver errors, etc works really well.

anyways, I'm rambling. So yes, tech support people are useful. You should buy them cookies.

I'm making an educated guess that this example is the reason we will continue to lack quality items.

I'll gladly extend my knowledge to anyone who needs it. I'm not some super special level ten computer wizard like Kao but I work in the industry and can fix most issues coming my way.

Outside of that. I lulz'd when the OP said he has an HP.

#4 is really fun when its your cousin on his mom's work laptop...