Notebook misadventures part 1: HP dv6125BR (dv6000 series)

Hello everyone. Been a long time since I have actually wrote anything in here and this post is about one of the reasons.

My darned HP dv6125BR Notebook that I bought on May 2007 simply decided to not work anymore about six months after I bought him. Which was a shame since despite the hardware/technical support/warranty issues that I am about to related, it worked very well on both Linux and Windows and it had decent specs by the price I bought him for. It was a 15″ wide Semprom 3400 with 512BM DDR2 of ram (which I quickly upgraded to 1GB), 60GB Sata Hard Disk and a nvidia 6120go graphics card. Now, the story:

After a few months of use, I had to make a BIOS upgrade to allow me to set how much memory it would assign for the video card, since by default it was using 256mb, a waste for that video card. Anyway, the updated worked fine, but sometimes the machined failed to turn on totally (although I think that was already happening before and since I saw the same problem on some non-bios-upgraded-laptops I don’t think this was the cause). Basically it would turn up the machine and its fans, but not the LCD and would never get to the POST screen. At first I had to turn it off and back on about 2-3 times to get it booting and working, and it started to get worse everytime, and when it was impossible to turn it on I took it to the repair shop, which took 3 weeks to return the notebook to me, but, it was working so I was pleased.

About 3 weeks after it was returned, the same problem started to appear again, and worse, the machine simply froze all the time for no aparent reason. So I lost my patience and called HP’s helpdesk. They told me that they would need to repair the notebook again and that it would take another 3 weeks for that, but they would give me 2 months of extended warranty and that they would come to my office to get and deliver the notebook, so I figured it was ok to wait a little longer, but then the pain began:

1 – They went to my HOME to pickup the notebook instead of my office as it was agreed upon, on the 3rd week after I had called requesting the support;
2 – When I called HP, they told me that they would have to take another 3 weeks to retrieve the notebook and the attendant there had the nerves to tell me that she could not answer for the person who had oppened the first request wrong and that I would have to follow “the process flow” even though it was not my fault. I was so angry that I told her to screw with it and that I wanted to return the notebook. Which caused her to open another support ticket.
3 – More than two months passed with HP rarely contacting me (they always said they would call me back in X days, but never ever did) and no one being able to inform me of anything. Just waiting with a broken notebook and no money to buy a new one.
4 – After a huge while they returned me the money, which I don’t have anything to complain since they returned it with the corrected values (because of the time that passed) and they took the notebook away.

Now, one would think that I was just unlucky, but there are two different people here at work that bought HP notebooks from the dv6000 series (one in Canada and the other in the US) and they BOTH had hardware issues, one of them having the exact same as mine, so therefore I do not recommend anyone from buying computers from the HP dv6000 series unless they fixed those issues.

So that was a very short summary of my misadventures with my HP notebook, I hope it serves as a lesson for other people. Please note that I am not saying that “HP is bad” or something like that, just that mine and my co-workers experiences with their dv6000 series was very bad.

S.