Fighting with HP

Remember that sweet laptop I bought for the wife last year? Well, last week, it crapped out. All data beyond recovery. Which, for my wife, was mostly her Itunes collection. But, thanks to CopyPod, I'll be able to recover that pretty easily.
Now, finally, the laptop is back up and running again, but it has been a major pain dealing with HP this past week. To start with, their call centers in India are sadly understaffed. We had to call them four times and it took us anywhere from 40 to 60 minutes on hold before we ever got to talk to anyone. And then, despite the fact that I bought this machine directly from HP and it's registered with them, we had to start over every time we talked with them - when did we buy the machine? What is the problem? Did you try xxx? How about yyy? Even though we had a case number from the first time we talked to them and referenced it each time, it did no good. I'm just about convinced that the case number is just some random string of digits that they feed you to make you think they know what they're doing. Every time we talked to someone new, they had no information on what we had already been through and seemed to know nothing about our particular machine.
After the first call, they decided the hard drive had gone bad (seems to be a lot of bad hard drives going around lately). So, they sent me a replacement. For starters, the replacement drive was a much slower model than what I had bought for the machine. I specifically upgraded the drive when I ordered the computer. But, I figured I ought to stick it in to at least see if that would work. Well, the Windows XP CD that came with the computer gave me an error message about a corrupt file. Great. So, does that mean the DVD drive or something else was bad? I pulled out my old copy of Windows 2000 and was able to install that to the drive with no trouble. So, I concluded that the XP CD itself was defective. I called them back, waiting for over an hour, to request a replacement CD and the correct hard drive, which took about an hour of struggle. But finally it was done and the new CD and drive arrived today. Thankfully, I had no trouble installing the drive or XP with the new stuff. The one saving grace is that there was still one month left on the warranty, so it cost me no cash, just a lot of time and frustration.
Still, I would have been even more monumentally pissed if the drive had crashed, say a year from now. I would have been able to buy a new drive pretty cheaply, but the defective XP CD would have been a show stopper.
After this ordeal, the wife has declared that we will not consider HP for computers in the future, and I can't argue with that. We will definitely spend a couple of extra bucks to find a supplier that is going to offer more capable service. Those who know me know that I'm a pretty tech savy guy. I don't require hand holding when it comes to dealing with software and hardware. But, when something breaks, I expect the manufacturer to be there to fix it. I had to fight too damn hard and spent too damn much time on this for me to put up with this from HP again.