Normally, I forward such complaints to the eminently capable (and much more charming) Christina Tynan-Wood, proprietress of , who handles these things with aplomb and even sometimes in return.

But I had to share this kvetch from Cringester D. M. regarding his HP DV9000 Pavilion notebook. A number of these laptops have a defective left hinge, . D. M. noticed that because of the defect, his laptop was not going into hibernation mode when he closed the case, which could cause overheating and much more serious problems later on.

So he contacted HP and prepared to send the unit in for repairs. There's just one small hitch: To fix the problem, the tech said D. M. had to include his hard drive so they could wipe it clean and reinstall the OS. As he writes:

WTF? Nothing was mentioned about this during the initial conversation, and I got the distinct feeling that I only found out because I happened to ask the right question.... Sounds kind of like taking your car in for a tune-up and finding out that all of your registration information, favorite radio stations presets, favorite seat positions, etc have been removed.... So I can count on and trust HP to totally frag my OS configuration in order to fix a broken hinge. Great!

I've had similar experiences, and not just with HP. The solution to virtually every PC problem seems to include starting over from scratch with a clean install of Windows. I think the real problem here is that a) Microsoft forces OEMs to provide Windows support, b) OEMS don't want to do it, because Windows is too expensive and complex to support adequately and that would obliterate whatever profit margins they have left, so c) customers (and their hard drives) get hosed. But why this has to happen just to fix a hinge is beyond me.