You are at high risk when buying from HP: poor quality, horrible service, fraudulent extended warranty promises. Your options are to either pay money to an independent repair shop or spent a lot of time and neural cells to claim your warranty protected rights.

I’ve bought Pavilion p6370t in February 2010, and it rebooted randomly after a few days, which then started to happen more and more often.

All evidence pointed to hardware, as the OS didn’t blue-screen most of the time, after I configured Windows not to reboot automatically, and left no events in the Event Logger. This indicates that Windows had no control of the computer when it rebooted. The occasional blue screens suggested checking the video card. As I’ve learned, nobody in HP support was capable of understanding this finding.

I had no choice but to start calling the “award-winning” HP support. I’ve spent many days and hours with their support, which made me re-sit all memory planks in every slot, run and re-run their system checks, memory checks, configure Windows “not to restart automatically”, which I did on my own already, but they wouldn’t listen. And they wanted me to hung up and call back after advising to do these things, and then I had to talk to a new person again and explain all from scratch.

During one particularly long call lasting 3 hours, they requested me to reinstall the OS from “factory recover, ” which didn’t stop the problem from occurring. The rep promised that this would be the last troubleshooting activity before shipping it back.

Nevertheless, her "hardware" boss then took charge, disregarded the promise, and wanted me to re-run all tests, which I did, and then leave the system in BIOS "for a few days" and “see if it happens from there.”

I rebelled, yelled and they moved my case to the “case managers” department. I pressed the issue of the on-site repair I purchased, which she attempted, but it turned out to be a lie – see the specifics below, and, after wasting a week and my day-off, I agreed to ship my PC to HP center, was sent a FedEx box, shipped it, and finally got it back 2 more weeks later: they replaced the faulty video card, which stopped the problem, so my PC is finally usable at the end of May. (All prepaid shipments are slow FedEx ground - HP isn't in a hurry.)

Some specifics:
1. Every support call must go through their lengthy voice recognition driven menus, followed by the need to give your name, phone, system serial number etc, even if you have your case number already – about 5-10 minutes just to start the conversation.
2. The voice call quality is poor; they often have static, which makes their thick foreign accent even harder to understand.
3. Support people don’t bother reading the notes left by the previous person and ask you to run the same tests you’ve done before. You have to demand that they read the notes, but many of them still want you to repeat the same tests anyway.
4. Support people are computer illiterate. One of them told me that blue screens are impossible to see remotely. I made her logo n into my computer and gave her a tour of Event Logger to demonstrate that such events are logged as bug checks. She said: “wow.”
5. The “case managers” are computer illiterate as well and are outsourced to India too - an "upgrade" since I've dealt with HP a 2 years ago, when they were in the U.S.
6. As many as 20 case managers share the same pool of cases and the same email inbox, which they don’t bother to read, unless you insist when on the phone with them.
7. A case manager would be able to open a 150KB email with a picture (I’ve sent the Even Logger snapshot.) I guess, they have virtual workstations with the server overseas. This is too moronic for a tech company.
8. The “2d day on-site repair” I paid $79.99 for is a lie. Here’s what that means in reality:
a. You have to run systems checks and tests per HP support instructions indefinitely, until THEY figure out what the problem is, which may never happen.
b. If you press for your rights, they would set up an appointment with you in a week from today, to guarantee that the part would arrive on time.
c. On the day of appointment the local technician will call you and say that the part hasn’t arrived. If you're lucky, he'd call you the night before, so you could spare your vacation day.
d. The case manager has no direct communication with either technicians or the parts warehouse: he or she can only send "inquiries", which they have to respond in 12 hours ... I am still waiting to hear why the part didn't ship at all.
e. They only replace one part (!) per visit.

This is my second and last purchase from HP. My previous one, a laptop, had its video card overheated and burned, which required 3 shipments back and forth to fix, with similar idiotic technical support experience.