“Leo Apotheker’s disastrous tenure as HP’s CEO revealed a dysfunctional company struggling for direction after a decade of missteps and scandals. Can his replacement, Meg Whitman, fix the tech giant?” As a consumer, I wish they simplified their product line-up. They have the engineering skills – I just have no idea what I’m supposed to buy when I visit their site. The choice for the ZenBook late last year instead of anything HP had to offer was elementary.
They used to make great calculators though.
Recently they reisued the HP-15C. All of the “Voyager” series are terrific. I have them all, except for the HP-10C.
And I’d kill to get my hands on a HP-71B.
I am not old enough to like those kind of calculators but I really like the TI82-TI83. Can I buy an android app that works the same?
Edited 2012-05-10 13:00 UTC
I’m not in to Android, but there are a couple of iOS apps that emulate the HP-12C. I’m sure Android also has some famous calculators emulated.
Andie Graph worked for me.(last time it didn’t) Pretty stupid that TI didn’t put a legal app in the store.
Try eBay to buy a real one! I prefer real calculators to emulated ones.
I still have my HP 40G graphing calculator around. Bought it in the high school days, and it’s still awesome for the price today.
…I wish they’d stop pre-loading their computers with SO. MUCH. CRAPWARE. My girlfriend bought a decent HP laptop a while back, and I spent hours deleting 15+ utterly useless apps — most of which are called HP-something, but they all have separate uninstall entries in the control panel — just to make it boot and function normally.
If I was less tech savvy, I would have probably concluded “HP laptops are slow and terrible” and avoided the brand in the future. Not that other PC manufacturers don’t bundle crapware, but I am under the impression that HP is worse than most.
I don’t care how much crapware they load on, as long as I get a genuine Windows install disc with the computer. The first thing I do when I get a PC like that is format and reinstall clean. If they won’t provide a DVD and insist that the ‘restore partition’ is good enough, that is a deal-breaker for me. I don’t even mind paying a little extra to get the install disc, since I know that the crapware is probably where most of their profits are coming from.
As for HP computers in general, I figure if they’re selling them at Wal-mart, that’s probably one brand I should avoid like the plague.
They’re selling sony, sharp, lg, panasonic and samsung too, are you avoiding them like plague?
Edited 2012-05-09 23:52 UTC
WorknMan,
“I don’t care how much crapware they load on, as long as I get a genuine Windows install disc with the computer. The first thing I do when I get a PC like that is format and reinstall clean.”
Last month I bought a new win7 computer for someone, it fatally crashed on the third boot, and even system recovery failed to fix it. I was tempted to return the whole system but there were no hardware faults, so I did a reinstall from the supplied OEM DVD, with no crashes yet.
However the DVD did reinstall all the OEM bloatware, which I had to go through and remove a second time. So my question is, how can you get a clean windows install without purchasing a clean version of it separately?
If worse comes to worse, you can download a copy of Windows from P2P (or your favorite warez spot), and use the serial that came with your computer. Just make sure it is the same as what you have – eg, OEM Home Premium, or whatever.
I had the same problem, I wanted to reinstall my notebook with clean Windows.
You need to download installation DVD for the right Windows edition. After installation, activate Windows via phone.
Dont buy HP
Dell’s reinstall disks are clean and work like vanilla Windows disks.
I think that Dell are pretty much alone there. Asus, too, make you burn by yourself a tweaked restore image that takes up no less than 5 DVDs !
Pretty ugly practice for a company that otherwise produces flawless hardware for an attractive price. But well, real geeks don’t use OEM-provided OS images, I guess…
Edited 2012-05-10 18:00 UTC
new hp recovery discs comes with bloatware. you can’t avoid it. even after calling tech support, they told mr that there is no bloatware free recovery disc available. the only solution is to be a retail windows dvd…..
toshiba do the same….
HP will now have good new excuse – more and more machines which lack optical drives.
Great article, thanks for posting it.
Technically astute people don’t buy HP PCs any more. They are are loaded with crapware and lack a Windows disk (a recovery partition is not enough). They also have marginally-useful proprietary tweaks.
In the server space HP doesn’t surround their HP-branded hardware with the useful software competitors offer. Compaq-branded servers are hanging in there much better.
If Ms. Whitman can turn the HP mess around, maybe she’ll have proved she would have been a good Governor after all. I’d hesitate to make any quick conclusions about her efforts. It might take years to get to an accurate judgement on her results.
I’ve always seen HP like this:
Great HW, poor SW.
I am working with Desktop PCs and big irons as Proliant servers and blade systems.
Putting Linux, *BSD & VMWare on these systems is a dream.
Unbreakable.
…But their softwares… What a pity !
Edited 2012-05-10 08:45 UTC