HP - technical support is useless!

For a couple of weeks, my HP laptop has been playing up. It usually gives a low battery warning at 14% power, then hibernates at 9% so that I know to plug it in and I don't lose work. Recently it stopped doing this and would cut out unexpectedly, so I kept losing work. I know why it was doing it - the battery isn't as good as it used to be, so I needed to set the warning time to a higher level. I just needed to know how!

HP support is absolutely rubbish! Might as well have asked a bunch of trained monkeys! They all told me the same thing - open up the Control Panel, click 'Power Options', and then 'Performance' and adjust the display and hibernate settings.

They kept telling me this like a broken record for ages after I'd told them that there was no link labelled 'Power Options' in the Control Panel. There was an option for Power Settings, but not on the main page. I had to search for it. And that wasn't any help whatsoever either.

So they finally listened to what I was saying and told me it must be a faulty battery. Grrr. I know what's wrong with the battery already! I'd already told them that! So then they told me to click 'Troubleshoot' in HP Support Assistant and follow the directions from there. Again, there was no 'Troubleshoot' option.

In the end, I gave up and decided to search around myself and find out how to solve it.

Finally managed to do it. On my own, thank you very much, HP Support! Pfft.

Probably need to be looking into getting a new battery at some point!

How very frustrating, unfortunately yes some of these services are useless.
Way to go you sorting it yourself

And if I saw right yesterday they are attempting a takeover of Dell

Oh God

Did you try clicking the power options in the control panel ........and run!

Yeah, you better run!

you want to try talking to the server guys, they have no concept of urgancy at all. I had a back plane in a server toasting hard drives acouple of years ago and it was the data base server for the hosted email system.
to put it simply it was serving email for 2k plus business users and a mission critical server at the time.
bearing in mind this was during working hours whan I called them and I had explained the situation to them as well. was gob smacked when he asked me to upgrade the firmware and reboot it... nope i said, the phones would go into meltdown. besides i'd found that the back plane had issues by searching there forums. he was still adament that i had to upgrade the firmware, reboot and send him the log files...
so at 2am i did as they asked fearing that our last redundant hard drive would be next on the hit list, thankfully it wasnt and sent in the logs.
next morning i got a reply, its the back plane and we'll ship one out to you... no * shirlock I told you that yesterday even though the server was backed up it would still have taken hours to restore fully and all the time we would have been getting phone calls from clients, is it done yet, how long will it be etc etc etc. before they go on to tech support they should have a stint on the frontline to taste the pain

Most of them don't actually have a clue. They work from a script/list of common problems and resolutions. When something comes up that isn't on the list, they ask you to hold while they "pass you over to a specialist."

tell me about it, it gets very frustrating when you are telling them what the problem is but its at number nine on thier list. I could write a book on shoddy tech support....

See, this I could have told you. I can't tell you how many times I have had to tell the HP tech help what was wrong and how to fix it.

I had the misfortune of working for HP. I really have nothing positive to say about them