What's the cost of a broken laptop hinge? How about all the data on your hard drive? Cringely shares one reader's tale of tech support woe. Regular readers may have noticed that with all my ranting lately about schoolteachers, Web censors, and Microsoft Vista, I don’t do many straight-up consumer complaint posts any more. Normally, I forward such complaints to the eminently capable (and much more charming) Christina Tynan-Wood, proprietress of InfoWorld’s Gripe Line blog, who handles these things with aplomb and even sometimes finagles vendors to issue refunds and/or working products in return. But I had to share this kvetch from Cringester D. M. regarding his HP DV9000 Pavilion notebook. A number of these laptops have a defective left hinge, which HP will repair for free. D. M. noticed that because of the defect, his laptop was not going into hibernation mode when he closed the case, which could cause overheating and much more serious problems later on. So he contacted HP and prepared to send the unit in for repairs. There’s just one small hitch: To fix the problem, the tech said D. M. had to include his hard drive so they could wipe it clean and reinstall the OS. As he writes: WTF? Nothing was mentioned about this during the initial conversation, and I got the distinct feeling that I only found out because I happened to ask the right question…. Sounds kind of like taking your car in for a tune-up and finding out that all of your registration information, favorite radio stations presets, favorite seat positions, etc., have been removed…. So I can count on and trust HP to totally frag my OS configuration in order to fix a broken hinge. Great!I’ve had similar experiences, and not just with HP. The solution to virtually every PC problem seems to include starting over from scratch with a clean install of Windows. I think the real problem here is that a) Microsoft forces OEMs to provide Windows support, b) OEMs don’t want to do it, because Windows is too expensive and complex to support adequately and that would obliterate whatever profit margins they have left, so c) customers (and their hard drives) get hosed. But why this has to happen just to fix a hinge is beyond me.I’m still waiting to find out whether D. M. bit the bullet and gave up his data for a broken hinge. I’ll let you know what I find out. In the meantime, let’s open the floor. What strange or ridiculous requests have support techs made of you, and what did you do about it? Post your tales of woe below, or e-mail me direct: cringe (at) infoworld (dot) com. Think you’ve got the right stuff to pass our tech quizzes? They’re not as easy as they look: • The InfoWorld News Quiz • Test Your Geek IQ • Test Your Knowledge of Geek Celebrities Software DevelopmentSmall and Medium Business