I have had no problem with the quality of HP machines. But, their support is horrible. I purchased a computer in late 2010 and in 2012 when Windows 8 came out, I could not upgrade it because they did not offer drivers for it. Their official policy (http://www8.hp.com/us/en/ad/windows-8/about-upgrading.html) is to only provide drivers for computers purchased after October 2011. A one year support window for products is completely unacceptable in my eyes.

Heres a tip if you want to buy hp - buy their enterprise class hardware (probook / elitebook). The support on those is very good.

Bollocks - they are just as shit with respect to support.

Not in my experience - I have had spare parts overnighted to me on two occasions. Theres a 24/7 online chat which has had surprisingly good people that have been able to fix issues.

What country are you in? I'm talking about UK support, so you might have better luck in another country.

I am in the US.

I'd say the same about Dell.

Just install the Vista/Windows 7 drivers. The majority of them will work without issue.

That is true apart from Intel Graphics.

Right, but those are supplied by Intel, not HP...

HP doesn't write or supply any drivers - they are all 3rd party packages rewrapped by HP.

Contrary to this, I'm still getting driver updates for my 2007 ThinkPad T61.

I've bought many laptops, and regretted it every time I didn't buy a ThinkPad. That's not to say the others are bad. It's just that ThinkPads are in a class of their own.

I can't give you any experience on that front, since I mostly use Linux.

"I miss the days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers." -- Linus Torvalds

Enough of that. Because Windows 8 uses the same kernel as Windows 7 (and Vista) with a minor .x upgrade, you should just use the 7 drivers, as they'll most likely work.

Anyway, I don't understand why you would want to "upgrade" to W8 anyway. It's not good at all unless you have a touchscreen, and the performance gains are very minimal. Just stick with 7, trust me, you'll be happier.

That doesn't work for graphics drivers as there is a different driver model for Windows 8 than Windows 7.

But aren't the graphics drivers supplied by Intel or nVidia, not HP? Whenever I've had to download a graphics driver update it has always been from the manufacturer of the chip. I don't think HP is to blame for that...

Agreed - this is not HP's responsibility.

HP warranties and support are just as bad for corporate customers. It's easier to just buy parts from Misco and fix it yourself most of the time. That goes for everything from desktops to high end servers. Sony service stinks as well.

Lenovo have been ok for corporate support from experience - they bend over backwards for us although we occasionally get a bad rep which needs threatening a bit :)

As for HP's other products, their calculators are a bit crappy (made by chinese outfit Kinpo), their printers are shit I agree and their best line of kit (test gear), they spun off to Agilent so the HP brand wouldn't take them down.

I've only had one ThinkPad break, and I had it for less than a year at the time. Three weeks before the laptop turned 1 year old, I called Lenovo, and was redirected to an Irish support guy who had limited knowledge of my native language.

After trying to make clear what was wrong with the machine, he told me my warranty had already expired (though my invoice was dated less than a year before that, and the EU requires consumer electronics to come with a minimum of 2 years of warranty). The issue was never resolved, and I performed the needed repairs myself.

We've had similar issues. You usually just threaten to "come to fucking <insert country> and burn the support center down" and they will escalate it to the right people and it will get resolved.

Fine example: Sony just replaced my spare TV which was 2 years out of warranty.

As for my ThinkPad, I bought two. If this one fails, I will just get the other one out and use it whilst repairing this with bits from eBay for not much money at all.