Hewlett-Packard - HP Refusal to honor warranty on alleged bio-hazard Palo Alto California
I am the not-so-proud purchaser of an HP Pavillion notebook that HP refuses to cover under warranty due to alleged mold contamination. You heard me right - they claim there's mold inside the computer and that repairing it would be a health hazard for their technicians. How mold can grow inside a computer is a mystery to me, since mold can't ingest plastic or metal to my knowledge.
Now, I can't find any mold contamination at all - not on the hard drive, not on the battery, not on the memory modules, not on the CD/DVD drive, not on the keyboard, not on the LCD, not on any boards visible to me through the back of the unit. Nada. To make matters worse, HP won't provide me any evidence of this alleged mold, like photos. They claim they saw it and that's that.
The HP technician in Tennessee (the warranty repair center) told me that they would fix the computer if I had it professionally decontaminated with documents certifying that the decontamination was done. I spoke to both Firedog and Geek Squad - they don't offer anything like this. In fact, the Firedog guys literally laughed at me when I told them the story and they told me that HP was screwing with me. I can't find any mold decontamination services for computer equipment online. Not to mention I am suspicious that one can't decontaminate a computer without damaging it, giving HP yet another excuse to refuse to honor the warranty.
I filed a consumer protection complaint with the State of New Jersey. Haven't heard back from them yet.
Greg
Jersey City, New Jersey
U.S.A.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
The_phantom_poster
West Plains,Missouri,
U.S.A.
Standard process...
#2UPDATE EX-employee responds
Thu, February 12, 2009
I know it seems silly, but due to customers "abusing" service center technitians, the BIO-HAZARD rules had to be put into place, and they are very strict. The BIOHAZARD rules say that if moldly or fungus growths, animal droppings, (mice) insects, (ants and such), or anything along those lines is found inside a notebook, that it is not to be repaired, it is to be sent back. Keep in mind that these rules exsist because the service centers would somtimes get computers that mice had nested in, that were full of ants, had big clumps of black mold.....things of that nature. So they put the rules into place to prevent that from happening. Unfortunatly the rules are very strict....if there is one single ant in that notebook, it's not supposed to be fixed, one single mouse dropping, or one little smudge of mold. Now a technitian might just ignore it and fix the computer anyway.....which would be nice for the customer, but they aren't supposed to. For an agent to ignore that little bit of mold is breaking the rules, and, although he'd probably never get caught, he COULD get in trouble for it...
And mold can grow anywhere that there is moisture, including metal surfaces.