Lexington Computer Repair Blog

Customers ask me quite often my advice on what brand of new laptop computer to buy. Personally I favour Thinkpads, I’ve been using them for almost 20 years and I’ve never had one fail me yet. I have 3 of them here in the house that are at least 7 years old and they are still going strong (OK, the X22 has some screen issues but it’s still very serviceable). Generally though I tell people to look for a good deal on a laptop, get one with a dual-core processor and 1 or 2 GB RAM and they should be OK whether it’s Dell or Toshiba or Gateway or whatever Best Buy happens to be selling at the time. I have now added to my advice the following – whatever you do, don’t get an HP laptop. Sure, all manufacturers have some problems and you’ll find no shortage on the internet of pissed-off owners of various kinds of laptops, but in my experience the consistency of problems with HP Pavillion laptops is unequaled.

I’m a small repair shop in a relatively small town. There are probably 30 other computer repair places here in Lexington and maybe 50 if you draw a bigger circle around the “Greater Lexington Area”. I figure I probably do about 10% of the repair business that Geek Squad gets and I’m probably right it the middle for the amount of business the average small repair shop handles. In the last two weeks, I alone have had a dozen, that’s 12, HP Pavillion owners come to me with the exact same problem. Right now here I have 2 DV2000, 2 DV9000, a TX 1000 and a DV6000 Pavillion here for repair. Now that sounds good for me but it’s bad for the owners. All of these computers suffer from the same design flaw that causes them to overheat and burn out the wireless card, the video chip and/or the power distribution chip. In each case, the fix is to replace the system board – a pretty expensive proposition. Now, if my little shop is seeing this many of these machines, many of which are only 2 years old, imagine how many of them are really out there!

Of course HP knows about this problem. To their credit, HP started a recall of these machines, well their term for it was “Limited Service Enhancement Program” a while back. Unfortunately, they didn’t cover all of the machines that appear to suffer from the problem and, I guess because they didn’t name it a “Recall”, the time period to report your machine for a deservedly free repair was limited. So, even if your machine was poorly designed and even if HP know about it, and even if they admitted it had a problem and offered to fix it for you, if you didn’t know about the offer or are a few days “late” in enquiring about it, you’re screwed. Pay them $260 to change the system board or go buy a new computer. That’s not right.

I called HP today on behalf of a customer and spoke over a very bad telephone line to one of HP’s agent’s who must have been in the Phillipines. As best I could tell his name was Debie, maybe it was Randie, it was a very bad line. He told me, “Mr. Hamrin, your machine is out of warranty but was covered under our Limited Service Enhancement Program. Unfortunately though, this extended program ran out in October.” Now, I explained to Debie/Randie that the machine actually had been broken since October, but it took the owner a couple extra weeks to report it (I was calling HP on 18 November). No dice says, Debie/Randie, it’s too late, you should have called in October. You have no recourse. Debie/Randie told me that he was the final authority on this.

Sorry HP, that’s not right. You sold a defective computer, you should fix it, period.

So if you have an HP Pavillion DV 2000, DV 6000, DV 9000, TX 1000, TX 2000 or any other HP Pavillion laptop that is showing any of the following behaviours, call HP at 1 800 HP INVENT right away and ask for a new system board:

• HP Pavillion Wireless card won’t turn on
• HP Pavillion won’t power on
• HP Pavillion graphics freeze

If your computer is either under warranty or just out of warranty, maybe you’ll still be under their program, I hope you are. If you aren’t, my advice is to get your files off your HP and take it as a lesson learned that you should never buy an HP laptop.

Edit (24/2/10): If you would like to get an idea of the scope of this problem and HP’s indifference to it or if you would like some instruction on taking HP to small claims court, go to this excellent HP problems site.

I have an eMachines computer here this week that the owner brought in with a power problem. After being turned on, the computer will run for a few seconds then all the fans stop and the power light begins blinking. The only way to restart it is to pull the plug and go through that routine again.

Generally there are two possible reasons for this behavior, one that you are hoping for and one that you are hoping against. If you are lucky, the problem is with a shot power supply. Sometimes this can be determined with a power supply tester, but in my experience this is hit-or-miss and the best thing to do is replace the power supply and see if the problem goes away.

Alas, my customer had the second problem, a blown motherboard. You can’t always identify this by looking but quite often you can. Open the case and look at the capacitors on the motherboard. The capacitors are the cylinder-shaped thingies, usually black with silver tops on them sticking up from the motherboard. They will often be clustered around the processor or the RAM. Normal capacitors have perfectly flat tops with little crimps in the shiny metal. If some of the capacitors on your motherboard are bullet shaped, with the tops puffed up, they are shot. You might also see some rusty gunk oozing from bad capacitors.

If you have the first problem, get a new power supply and you’ll be back in business, if you have the second you’re going to have to decide between a new motherboard and a new computer. Often it just makes more sense economically to replace the whole computer – alas. On the other hand, if you are good with a soldering iron, you can try buying a kit of new capacitors and replacing yours, it should work and you don’t have much to lose.