Hewlett-Packard Looses Lawsuit Over Incompetent Tech Support

On Sunday, December 6, 2009 I purchased a new Hewlett-Packard Officejet 6000 color printer. After spending over an hour in attempting to install the software that came with it, I called HP technical support and spoke to Samarjeet in Pakistan. He took control of my computer from his location and spent about an hour trying to identify the problem. Eventually, after putting me on hold for fifteen minutes, he announced that he had identified two services on the computer that needed to be running and that would not start automatically.
He proceeded to edit the registry as a solution to getting these two services to run. Upon rebooting, the computer would not function anymore. I asked Smarjeet if he had backed up the registry before he modified it. He replied that he had. I asked him to walk me though the process to restore the registry backup but he said he could not do that. He said that a supervisor would call me back on Monday which never happened.
I called HP tech support on Monday morning, December 7, 2009 and spoke with a person in Canada. I asked if he could send someone to my home office to repair the computer so that I could proceed with conducting my business. He said that HP did not have any people available to repair computers. I asked and he located some IT firms near my location. I engaged TekScape to repair my computer and the technician was at my home office later in the morning and spent most of the day rebuilding my hard drive and reinstalling Windows and most of the system drivers. I spent an additional two full days reinstalling all of my software and data.
I contacted HP and aksed them to reimbuse me my costs. They offered me $150 which was an insult. I filed suit in small claims court. HP sent a manager from their service group to represent them in court. He argued that the warranty didn't cover data or software. I pointed out to the judge that I wasn't making a claim against the product for breach of warranty. Rather my claim was for negligence on their part causing me to suffer damages. I have been awarded $800 plus court costs.
It's about time that these US companies hiring incompetent foreigners were made accountable for their acts. By the way, the printer cost my about $90.