Dave Donaldson

There's been some news the last couple days about HP recalling 135,000 notebook batteries for various models (apparently they tend to overheat and sometimes melt). I've been experiencing the overheating problem the last couple weeks, where out of nowhere my HP laptop just turns off. Literally. This is obviously a safety feature to save itself from blowing up in my face, but it's become a huge pain in the ass for me. Hard to bang out code when your machine can't stay on.

But what I'm really pissed about is that nowhere on HP's homepage is there mention of the recall. Why not? The battery problem is such a potential serious issue that it should be there in nice big bold letters: BATTERY RECALL - GO HERE NOW! So I figure I can find it under their Support section. Again, no mention of the recall on the main page of the Support section.

I go back to HP's homepage and look around some more. Maybe they hid it under Newsroom. That kind of makes sense as any recall of any size is usually newsworthy. Uh, apparently not in the eyes of the screwups at HP.

So I try another tactic: I'll do a search for “recall”. Whatd'ya know, the first result is for the battery recall. So I follow the link and low and behold, finally, some useful info about the recall. And of course I have one of the defective batteries.

But I must say, I'm actually kind of outraged by this. Why the hell did I have to search for recall? Why was that not the first thing listed on their web site? I'll tell you why: because companies like HP think they can pull one over on consumers by making it more difficult than it should be in getting the appropriate information. And why is that? Because if I would have given up HP would have saved a couple hundred bucks. Absolute B.S.

And while I'm on the topic of HP, has anyone noticed the footer of their site? It says “© 2005 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.“ I'm sorry, but does anyone not in HP Marketing think of HP as a “development” company? I didn't think so. I think the words “development company” infers software, when in fact HP is a hardware company. And damn, they're having problems getting that right.