Digital Home Thoughts: Tech Support Gets Creative

"I am going to share with everyone a huge fiasco I found myself in with the folks at Creative Labs. If you remember, I reviewed a Compaq GX5000Z gaming system last November. This is a desktop system developed by Compaq that uses standard retail computer parts; the very same parts you can purchase at your local computer store. Nothing is integrated, and the system uses an MSI motherboard (K8N Neo 2 Platinum) which you could purchase yourself should you so desire."

Lets get beyond the HP tech support sucks responses and just think about the problems that we have with every OEM these days. Many computers don't ship with media so if you lose your hard drive or want to reinstall you could be out of luck. Most of us have gotten used to just typing our needs into Google and then download the driver, but more and more it is becoming difficult to do so. I had tons of trouble getting drivers for a miniPCI 802.11b card that Dell sold me for my Precision M50. I said it wasn't supported but it was an option on the build to order page, i just ordered it after I bought the computer. I spend a good day downloading every 802.11b laptop driver I could find on their site before one worked. It should be this hard should it?