It is probably better that way. Over the past 8 years or so I have seen HP
disintegrate in the PC market. They started going super cheap on parts and
quality, that it seems they spent more on class actions and recalls.
Example, I worked on a dv6000 that was notorious for the video chip failing
due to bad heatsinks. It even went back to them under the recall for them to
clean and reset it. I had to flatten out a small piece of copper water pipe,
cut it in a square, and shim it between the video chipset and the heatsink
with grease between it to get the computer to stop throttling the fans and
freezing.
My personal zv6000 is actually down right now because it needs some
soldering. They came up with a really crappy proprietary power supply plug
that the solder joints heat to the point they oxidize and fail (they are
small joints handling quite a bit of power) until they are resoldered. I've
replaced the connector once because the pins failed on the old one. I've
also gone through 5 power adapters. The first two stock, I started buying
cheap china ones only to find they fail less than the OEM models. I had
heard of a class action starting up on these connectors a while back but
seems they failed.
I also had 2 hp desktops that worked great until the caps blew up on them.
Basically they took what was once a good solid quality name and product and
disected the life out of it while jumping on as many new ideas and companies
as they could until they had nothing left. The greed got the better of them.
Sad really. But that is every company now and we pay for it.
When I hears the 'HP are pulling out of
computers' news, I tohught for
about 1ms 'Oh good... They can go and make top-qulaity measuring
instruments again'. Then of course I realised that was not going to
happen :-(
-tony