Received my replacement from HP..

So I received my second replacement from HP last Wednesday. Sent the dead system back the next day.

Heres a brief history of my "events" with HP.

Bought an HP dv5030us in March of '06. Noticed motherboard issues in June. Finally had a "case manager" at the start of July. Case manager was "Roy Herrera". Probably the worst person to ever work in a customer relations situation. Infact, if he had listened to me, none of this would have ever happened at all. Spent months going back and forth with Roy because he didn't believe I had any issues. 10 days before the 1 year warranty was up, the motherboard died. Next two months were spent sending the system back and forth to HP. Somehow it's easy to miss and not replace a dead motherboard. Had to buy a MacBook to have a working PC during that time period.

In May HP decided it was best to replace my system because I had received such bad treatment. Ya think? They send me a dv6345us. It has issues locking up from the start and the DVD drive isn't exactly spectacular. Process repeats. I spent more than 300 minutes in one month trying to deal with HP's outsourced Indian tech support. In August the DVD drive finally goes bad. System gets sent in. Comes back with a new DVD drive and the external casing all scratched up. The issues with locking up continue to get worse (I've reinstalled Vista several times by this point, using various driver configurations.. definitely not a software or Vista issue). The DVD drive fails again, somehow, after barely being used at all, the HDD starts to go bad, and the locking up has gone from random lockups that sometimes force a reboot to locking up and rebooting each and every time, even locking up while installing Vista and rebooting in the middle of the process. System gets sent out again. DVD drive gets replaced with a refurbished drive, more scratches appear, and the locking up continues. Even though my case manager "assures" me that my system would be completely repaired.

Case manager finally offers to replace the computer again. That leads me to where I am now.

He "builds" me an HP dv6500t. Core 2 Duo @ 2GHz (2MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB), 2GB of RAM, 160GB HDD, GeForce 8400M GS. A nice upgrade, after the step backwards from my dv5030us that was the dv6345us.

So far it works great. I had Vista on it for a few days. Not a single crash or other hardware issue. I did a fresh install of Vista. Ran about as good as a Vista system could. Which means it was stable, but extremely slow. So I used the little guide at the top of the forum here and threw XP on. MUCH better.

Funny thing about Vista is that the "Windows Experience Index" scored the GeForce 8400M lower than the Intel GMA 950 in my Mac for desktop and Aero graphics I'm definitely staying away from Vista.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy at the moment with this system. If no hardware issues pop up, I might finally be able to say I have a working HP system. What an amazing thought! I'm still keeping XP on my MacBook for the time being, just in case. But so far so good.

No issues at all. Runs fantastic. Even the headphone output sounds surprisingly good. Games run fantastic. I haven't been into PC gaming for years, but this will keep me occupied until GTA4 comes out and I pick up an Xbox360 for it.

I really can't stress enough just how much better it runs with XP. All of my game frame-rates doubled. Literally. I haven't checked the battery life yet. I'll definitely have to do that before I call HP, and the woman handling my BBB complaint, and let them know that everything is good. But this system runs amazingly good with XP. HP really should continue to offer XP until Vista's drivers and the OS itself can match XP in terms of speed.

I do like the hardware too. It still feels "cheaper" than my MacBook, but it looks nice. The newer "HP Imprint" is a very nice pattern and not generic like the dv6000 was.

So far everything is great. I'm hoping and crossing my fingers that nothing goes wrong. I'm tired of dealing with HP support and I'm sure they're tired of me too.

 

Good to hear that everything is okay so far. Hopefully it will stay that way.......

 

Thanks for sharing your story. It's all ways good to share it with others since there is a good percentage off people experiencing problems with their Laptops. I'm waiting for mine which is in because of a dead graphics card. Hopefully it will be fixed without any issues because there's not anything worse than having to send a product back and forth

 

I sent my laptop for repair because of a dead graphics card and it has been almost a month now. hmm.. I hope it would be totally fixed when they return it..

 

I've heard a lot of people saying that their laptop has been in for a month or longer. I'm surprised by this, because every time I've had to send mine in for repair (motherboard replacement, power supply replacement, etc) they only had it for 5 business days max and it was shipped back to me. It's definitely nice to hear people's stories on their experience with customer service and the build of the product so you can make better decisions.

Anyways, hope all goes well with the new laptop and it continues to give you trouble free usage!

 

Good to hear that you've finally got a notebook that works well (so far). Good luck with it!

 

Need to check with HP customer service everyday until they get your attention. It's strange this technical people give you a service ticket but everytime you call them back and give them your provided service ticket they act as if it is your first time you call them for repair. They will always ask you ("What wrong with your Laptop?") Duh I already provided you my service ticket it's your job to read what it say in your computer.

 

I got a call from HP and they said my expected ship date would be on the 24th.

 

Ha! I knew right at this point that you were in for a fun time. Roy was my case manager too - absolutely impossible to work with and despite consistant comments from other managers that they would have him "contact me asap", he never called me. This wouldn't have been a big deal if anyone else could have helped, but once you have a case manager, no one else at HP will do anything besides read your case and then say you need to talk to your manager. I won't turn this into a "Bash Roy" thread - but it's interesting to hear from another person who had him as their case manager and to see that he wasn't just singling me out for crappy service.

Mark

 

Well, the optical drive has proven to be unreliable. Giving me some read errors. It's also another drive that when burning a DVD (DVD-R and +R, Taiyo Yuden and TDK manufactured TDK discs), it spins the disc at 2x until around 6% completed, then it spins the disc up to 4x for most of the burn, then it spins it up to full speed. While burning CDs, it also varies in speed. You can actually hear it spinning up and down during the burn.

So now its time to get HP to replace it without me having to send the system in for repair or give up a CC number.

I can't believe HP has the guts to charge $250 for these drives at their online parts store!