My HP kept on crashing,freezing, or wouldn't start up at all. They couldn't fix it, and blamed it on viruses the 3rd to the last time I took it in, of which I had none,BTW, as their scans proved. After 2 years of the darn thing never working right, and unable to be fixed, I finally got it replaced with a new HP with Windows 7 last week. There was a differant tech at Best Buy that I had never seen before, in the dozens of times I have taken the 2 year old crappy HP in. He looked at my 1 1/2 inch stack of repair orders, told me this was totally unacceptable, and immediately replaced the computer with a new one.
I am learning to use this thing, slowly. As for HP themselves, I contacted them, and they told me that since I bought the extended service from Best Buy, and not from them, the manufactorer, I was out of luck, even though my computer has never worked right. It has been in the shop more than it has worked.
One Tech at Best Buy got it running temporarily, the 3rd to the last time it went in. He told me to take it home, turn it on, and back-up and save what info I could, because this was going to be a one-shot deal. I immediately bought an external hard drive before I left the store, and saved some of my info when I got home, but not all. It never turned on again after that. To top it off, my old clunky back-up computer, the 14 year old computer with Windows98, which held the rest of my info, decided to croak. My info on that old pos is irretrievable.
I had my techie daughter hook this new one up, but I still had dial-up, and even with the dial-up adapter we had to buy for this new computer(it had no connector for dial-up), it didn't want to work right. So now I had no choice but to upgrade, so I got AT&T broadband 3.0 and WIFI. The price was decent, $24.95 a month for both. FYI, my dial-up was extremely cheap at $8.25 a month.
I also now have a laptop for a back-up computer, which my daughter will teach me how to use after I get more educated on this new desktop.