Update (6/12): After informing HP that we were unwilling to pay their $750 repair charge, they decided to undo our service order and send the laptop back. They claimed we would receive the laptop by 6/11. After it didn’t arrive yesterday or today, Katy called and found out that it hasn’t been shipped yet and no one is able to confirm when it will be shipped back to us.

Update (6/17): The laptop finally arrived today, including a form saying it wasn’t fixed. After a bit of finagling, it turned on and booted into Windows. I’ll mess around with it over the next few hours, but it seems to me the motherboard having been destroyed by moisture can pretty much be fully ruled out at this point. My belief that HP made up a new problem to avoid fixing known problems under warranty is reinforced.

TLDR: HP has horrible products and horrible customer support, and I will never buy from them again no matter what.

* * *

Back in August me and my lady decided it was time to upgrade our computers. She had a Dell desktop that she got after high school graduation (it was starting to show its age) and I had a self-built desktop that I had continually upgraded over a few years. I wasn’t unhappy with what I had, but both of us really wanted more portability than a desktop offers (it’s great to be able to take your computer with everything on it to school or on trips and even just other rooms in the house).

Aside from portability, since we’re students, the main consideration was price.  I spent a few weeks doing some basic research and found that HP offered the best bang per buck ratio, especially with a nice discount code I found on fatwallet. We configured Katy’s in August. It was an HP DV6000Z series with a 15.4″ LCD, a gig of RAM, 120GB hard drive, and a 1.7GHz dual-core Turion. Pretty decent entry-level specs for a $600 machine.

I ordered my own a few weeks after hers arrived and I had some time to check it out and see that it was decent. Pretty much the same machine except the DV9000Z series which basically means it has a 17″ screen. I also opted for a 2GHz processor and two gigs of RAM.

First problem: After just a few weeks of having mine, I ran into major problems with the wireless network card - it worked very sporadically for a while, then stopped working entirely. I tried all the basic stuff like reseating it and messing with drivers to no avail. I contacted HP customer support and right away they offered to send me a replacement card which I gladly accepted, thinking it would fix the problem. The next day they went back on this offer and instead asked me to send the entire laptop back for repairs. Since I realized that meant a system restore, and since I had only just finished getting rid of all the crap bloat the laptop came with and putting all my stuff on it, I decided to get a wireless-n ExpressCard instead.

Fast-forwarding to March of this year, Katy’s laptop started having some weird problems. One problem (problem #2) was identical - the wireless problem. It seemed odd to me since we actually originally had different cards (she had wireless-g and my internal card was wireless-n) and different chipsets from what I can remember. Clearly it’s either a random fluke for us to have the same problem with different hardware or alternatively something else was wrong with the systems.

A few months later we ran into problem #3 - Windows wouldn’t properly recover from sleep mode. It was impossible to get the display to come back without rebooting the system. I mostly resolved this by just turning off sleep/hibernation altogether, but it was only a matter of time until we got burned again.

Problem #4 was that the system would boot into Windows (you could hear the startup sounds) but the display wouldn’t turn on without rebooting the computer a few times, opening and closing the lid and waving a voodoo chicken over the computer. Since the computer was sort of still useable and we didn’t want to deal with a system restore, we decided to wait and see if it was something we could fix on our own.

Before I could get that far, we ran into problem #5. Now the system wouldn’t boot at all and once in a while gave a series of BIOS beeps indicative of a display problem. I tried everything I could think of, including reseating everything and taking it apart and checking the display’s ribbon cable connection. No luck.

At this point I started doing some browsing on the ‘net and found that other people were having similar problems with their DV6000s and 9000s. Eerily similar problems that lots of people were running into. I even found a page on HP’s site that outlined the problems we had and the models affected (ours of course). Check out the site. It even says that it you’re experiencing the problems described, and have one of the models listed, you could be eligible for free repair. All other hope lost, we decided it was time to send it in.

HP sent us a pre-paid box to FedEx the laptop to them and they had it within a day or two. A week went by without hearing anything from them, so we checked the status on-line and found a $740 service charge listed. I figured it was because that was their estimate of what it’d cost to replace parts and that we’d be covered by the free repair since clearly they sold a bunch of defective laptops.

Later on Katy decided to call customer support and find out what was going on. Woops, I was wrong about the service charge being waived. They claimed that their certified technicians found “moisture” in the laptop and thus the warranty was voided (we didn’t have their expensive accidental damage plan). Nevermind the fact that the laptop had all the problems listed on their site and nevermind the fact that $740 to fix the laptop was $200 more than it cost in the first place. They also claimed that they had been trying to contact her, but she never received anything via e-mail, telephone or postal mail.

I called HP customer support on her behalf and was given the same spiel: broken display, broken LCD hinge cover, broken AC/DC adapter, broken fan, broken motherboard (and a few other things that I can’t remember) all apparently caused by “moisture” found on the motherboard. I tried getting an explanation of how there could be moisture on the motherboard if we never spilled anything on the computer and I was told I wasn’t being accused of having done anything myself. Why, I asked, if I hadn’t been responsible for what happened, should I be expected to pay for the damage? You see, I was told, heat issues in the laptop could have caused moisture to condense. I pleaded that if that was possible, it would mean that it was either due to a design flaw or a faulty fan, which should definitely be covered by warranty. After all, we never brought the laptop to the desert, or to the rain forest for that matter. And most of the problems began during the winter when humidity is low, and our apartment was a steady 65F.

When I was again told that I wasn’t being accused of damaging anything but that warranty wouldn’t cover it, I asked to speak with a supervisor. In response I was informed that a supervisor would tell me the same information. I asked to please speak with a supervisor. Same response. I just said the word “supervisor” a few times. Silence. Then, the unfortunate rep told me that we’d get a call from someone on Monday or Tuesday. I hung up and called again ten minutes later hoping for a better response.

Different rep but same story, sadly. This time around I really tried hard to plead and explain things in different ways and they still wouldn’t budge. Obviously, if their service technicians say there’s “moisture” on a motherboard that’s that. I pushed aggresively to speak with a supervisor just so I could make sense of this, all the while knowing that the “moisture” found inside the laptop was fabricated to void our warranty. I asked, “please, PLEASE can I speak with a supervisor” and after thirty seconds of silence the rep came back and told me there are no supervisors avaiable until Monday during business hours. I hung up.

Today, a Monday, during business hours, Katy called HP again. They gave her the same runaround, but she was at least able to speak with a supervisor (and his “senior agent”) who were more understanding of our perspective, even realizing that $740 was likely more than we paid in the first place. Turns out this didn’t matter since they decided to send back the laptop right away when we said we were unwilling to pay $740 to fix a $500 laptop that should have been covered by warranty.

So, now the laptop is on its way back to us, and I realize it’s likely only a matter of time until the display on mine stops working and then it stops booting entirely and then I send it in so they can tell me a power surge damaged the motherboard or there’s moisture in the case or I dropped it from a high building or ran it over or whatever else they think of to avoid covering it under warranty.

And then we’ll have to buy two new laptops. Just not HPs this time around.

(Oh, one of the reps did admit the source of the problems for most people: too much lead in their solder mix.  Of course they couldn’t admit ours was the same and accept the fact that we never spilled anything on the laptop or left it outside or used it in the shower and that it had the same list of problems that their site claims will be fixed for free.)