HP2133 Mini-note XP Pro Downgrade

First the good stuff... if you bought the mini-note with Vista Business call the Compaq order center at 1-800-952-7689 to order your XP Pro "downgrade" media. Unfortunately they are out of stock (their words) until around the middle of June. They won't take your order while the stuff is out of stock. Also I inquired about getting the media disks for Vista Business. She said I could but I couldn't order them at the same time (what gives with that?). So I told her that if I had to wait for the XP disks and can't order them now then I could order the Vista Business media now... she had to put me on hold to ask her supervisor. Eventually she came back on line and asked me for my serial number but then discovered they were out of stock at the moment and, you got it, 7 to 14 days before they were expected to be in stock. Anyway... at least I know the number works.

Now for the rant... Talk about frustrating. You call tech support and the automated call routing doesn't have an option for the HP2133 or the Mini-note so you get stuck in a loop. I finally broke free hoping that once I got real person they could direct me to the proper place. I talked to one tech support person that had no clue what the mini-note was and he kept saying that it was an Evo. I even tried to guide him to the proper place on the HP website and he kept saying that there weren't drivers available and why on earth would I want to load XP and Vista was such a wonderful product. He told me there was no such thing as a downgrade and I told that that was nonsense because I was looking at the website where it clearly stated that the Vista Business versions could be downgraded. He began to argue with me. That's when I lost it and eventually hung up... total time on hold or talking to an idiot... 55 minutes.

By the time I got home my wife had received two calls from HP tech support telling me to call back... but of course no direct line. So this afternoon I called the tech support line... got stuck in the cycle of no direct... finally broke the cycle and talked to a real person that transferred me... ended up talking to a guy at the Blade tech support center. Fortunately the guy there was really good and knew what I was talking about and said that the best bet would be to call the Compaq Order Center and request the Windows XP "upgrade". You got it... he considers Vista to be trash and thought that the XP Pro was an upgrade rather than downgrade. I had to laugh and yell hallaluyah. So anywhy, by accident I actually talked to someone that steered me right. It's really amazing how ignorant people will try to argue with you, even when you show them the proof. Amazing!!!!

 

Follow up: I finally contacted Compaq to order my downgrade CD. That was in September. Their reply was that my 5 months of software support had expired on August 31st. I mentioned that the disks weren't supposed to be available until mid to late June so how could I be 2 weeks past my expiration. They didn't seem to want to budge. I then informed them I was doing comparisons between the HP2133, a Asus EEEPC 1000H and the Lenovo S10 for work but had to disqualify the Mini-Note since it was Vista (which our company has not migrated to, and the other two units had XP installed).

Not only did I get my downgrade disks a few days later but also the Vista Business restore disks as well.