>>Hi,
>>
>>Anybody bought HP Spectre recently? The model in question is in the title. My younger daughter goes to school this summer and is looking for a new laptop. She is comparing Lenovo, Dell, and HP (this specific model). I know that Lenovo and Dell have a good reputation. But HP, I am not so sure. And Lenovo and Dell would cost (for the same memory - both SSD and RAM - size) about $500 more. She will not be doing IT study, just the school stuff. But she likes to have the latest and the greatest (my genes :)). I am concerned of how well (sturdy or robust or whatever the term to use) is HP notebook. And the only way to find out is from someone who has bought it.
>>TIA
>
>My family has sworn never to buy anything from HP again, not even a pencil sharpener. They may have (had) excellent engineers, but the company was long ago hijacked by quick'n'dirty sales department and worse financial one.
>
>So far:
>- a printer which worked just fine for a couple of years, then started endless self-test... well, at least as long as it had power and paper. It would still print fine, but after every print job it would wait a few minutes and launch another self-test after self-test
>- a pack of CDs labeled HP, about one in ten was usable, but didn't know for how long, whole pack went to garbage
>- a laptop where they promised 100$ rebate; sent them the proper documentation, then they replied I didn't send one of the two (didn't say which one, so I guess they didn't even open it, it was an automated rejection to a precalculated percentage of customers).
>- same laptop died because the video chip was overheating and it unsoldered. This was a common error in several series of HP laptops ten years ago, which was usually solved by inserting one cent coin between the chip and the copper heat conductor; this one cent of saving (*) had almost cost them a class suit, but the damage wasn't obvious until well beyond the warranty period so HP magnanimously gave everybody the middle finger. Sold it to my hardware guy, his daughter needed for same stuff like yours does, for $70.
>- daughter's laptop had a similar problem - overheating killed the onboard wireless network chip, and then something else too. It, predictably, happened in the 14th month of use, ergo no warranty. There was another class suit in the making, there were thousands of people with the same problem, but HP passes every cent it saves in production to its lawyers so they fended it off.
>- daughter inherited my printer so the printer she got from the office lay there unpacked. Three years later this big office HP combination box was finally unpacked and then it just refused to print, out of the box, with the infamous error message "your ink has expired". Which actually means this can happen with ink you just bought, if it was warehoused for long enough.
>
>IOW, the appropriate serbian saying would be "I wouldn't take even a walnut from their hands".

Thank you for your input. I knew that there will be wide range of experiences.