After buying myself a Compaq 700ES Presario Laptop I was pretty chuffed at finally being on the "Laptop bandwagon" I personally had a thing against laptops because they are either too expensive or cannot be easily upgraded (I build my own PC"s) but when you move to a new house that has limited space effectively retiring 2 of your 3 pc"s a laptop becomes more of an attractive option.
I live in Holland so when I bought my 700ES Presario I got the Dutch version of XP Home Edition Pre-installed, to cut a long story short the sales person more or less assured me I could get the English "Restore CD" via Compaq support. Hmm ok I thought, let"s try it then.
Phone call 1: "No problem sir, we"ll send you the English recovery CD"s out right away" Well, I received the Dutch recovery CD"s so I called them and asked what was going on. I was told that English CD"s could not be delivered to me. Oh? 3rd telephone attempt I am told that I can have the English CD"s and they would be sent out right away, ok I think... finally it"s sorted. Well I get the CD"s the installation is in Dutch and breaks off almost immediately after starting the install so I call again, this time after saying, well don"t worry about the English CD"s I understand you seem to have a problem delivering them, how do I get my Dutch CD"s working again? To this he just hung up.
I brought the laptop back this evening and don"t intend to do business with them again.
From what I am told this happens alot, I always build my own PC"s so this is a first but clear enough warning to me. If you have nightmare stories to tell after buying your pre determined system drop a comment, or is it just little old me :-(
Update: Thanks to The Stvo for this link which has some very interesting stories deriving from Compaq *cough* Customer Support *cough* which, well.. from my own personal experience isn"t very supportive!