"A year ago a friend purchased an HP PC with a 17-inch f1703 flat-screen display, and recently the monitor died," the reader wrote. "She called HP for support. We won't bore you with the details of her more than one-hour wait on hold before she could even speak to a service rep. But she did not want it to be a total waste of her time so she also went to the HP web site while on hold and found this link explaining the defect was due to a manufacturing process error. What this site doesn't tell you is that HP has decided that it is too much trouble to give their customers a like-for-like replacement. Therefore, users are getting a 15-inch flat-screen instead of a 17-inch because, in their own words, 'they're having too many problems with 17-inch displays.'"

The reader said his friend was not going to accept the downgrade of the monitor she'd paid for without a fight. "When they shipped the 15-inch monitor to her, she refused delivery and it was sent back," the reader wrote. "She called the customer support number and was again fed the line that all 17-inch displays were being replaced by a 15-inch displays. She refused to accept this and asked to speak to a supervisor. The agent refused to connect her with a supervisor, and at this point she was fed up with having to deal with the arrogance of an agent half a world away. Does that take the cake or what? You would think a company like HP would bend over backwards to provide a like-for-like or better replacement, not a lesser quality product. A quick visit to their web site shows that they are still selling 17-inch flat-panel displays, so I don't understand their substitution of a lesser display when replacing a defective one!"

By the time I heard from the reader's friend directly, she had taken the step so many readers have found necessary in the past: she called HP corporate headquarters to demand help. Ultimately she spoke to an HP senior case manager who said the overseas support reps had misinformed her. HP did not have a policy of replacing the defective f1703s with 15-inch units, he told her, and she would be shipped a 17-inch replacement display.

Even then she wasn't completely out of the woods. "Unfortunately, I still have not received the 17-inch monitor that I was told I would have by today," she wrote a few days later. "I called the corporate office to make sure everything was still on for today and the case manager still hadn't gotten a FedEx tracking number. He promised he would get back to me in an hour, but he didn't." Days later she was waiting to hear if and when the replacement monitor was shipping. "What is going on here? Whatever happened to customer care and genuine concern for the customer? I have been fortunate enough to have a neighbor let me borrow their old Gateway screen so I can work, but this nightmare seems endless."

Finally, two weeks into the ordeal, a package arrived. "Around 11:30 am today the FedEx truck delivered a package," she wrote. "Would you be willing to bet that the resent me a 15-inch screen? Well, they did! Another f1503, like the one I refused before." The shipping mix-up was soon corrected, however, and the reader's friend reports she now has a 17-inch replacement display that seems to be working fine. "All this shouldn't have had to happen," she wrote. "I have always thought of HP as a respectable company who always puts the consumer first. I've learned my opinion of HP has to change."