When we talk about HP products, There is a huge difference between consumer and business products. I think Skuzzy is talking about consumer PCs and laptops? right?
Whatever, you can allways install clean windows (or linux) to HP computer without extra software.
I have 10 years experience of selling and supporting HP products, PC:s, workstations, laptos, printers, servers, storage and network products (99.99% of them business products) and they have been really reliable systems over the years.
Reliable compared to what? Where I work we're 100% HP. The last batch of Intel cpu blade servers we got had 80% memory failures because HP in their infinite wisdom bought Hynix memory to put in their enterprise servers. A week ago we lost a terabyte of data on a SAN enclosure, something that had never occurred since HP started selling the enclosures, 2 bad drives is all it took, and in the past week we have had 6 more drives go bad...the enclosure has only been running 8 months. Over the past 18 months we have had to replace 30% of the hard drives in our SAN enclosures. Their equipment isn't any better than Dell or IBM.
When it comes to HP, reliability is a relative term, relative to the amount of money you want to spend on support. The differences between HP's business and retail systems, is customer support and the amount of useless bloatware that gets installed, nothing else. All you have to do is look at the spares numbers, and the copy of HP supplied parts catalogue I have on my computer shows how many parts are exactly the same between commercial and retail. All the company does is change the spares numbers.
