My laptop is dying one piece at a time.

[undecim]

I have an HP touchsmart tx2 that I bought online from HP for almost $800. I opted out of the warranty, because I can fix computers myself, and the money I saved on the warranty would probably buy a replacement part if I actually need one.

At first, the touchscreen/stylus was pretty cool. 2 months later, the touchscreen stopped working. Just suddenly stopped. It was still recognized and there was a /dev/input/event for it, but nothing happened. It wasn't after an update or anything

Then, when I got my new cell phone, I wanted to put some music and a background on the SD card. I had used by SD card read before, but this time, it didn't work. I had to put everything on a thumb drive and use my brothers AA1 to put it on the SD card.

Shortly after that, the plastic around the vent for the CPU fan broke, apparently from thermal expansion. The screw from the bottom of that corner fell out because the plastic that held it in broke, got caught in the fan, chipping it, and my CPU could no longer handle long periods of high CPU usage, so I bought a new fan/heat sink/heat pipe (basically, the entire cooling system was one big piece) and installed it.

Everything else was fine for about another month, I head something in the screen swivel go "pop" as I opened my screen. Now my screen wobbles back and forth between two positions when open.

Some time later, my Caps Lock light stopped working, and my touchpad started acting erratically, randomly jumping the cursor to side of the screen. I completely disconnected the touchscreen from the motherboard to make sure that wasn't causing the input, but the problem persisted.

Last night, I upgraded to the Lucid RC, and burned 3 CDs (2 of them at the lowest speed I have) and got 3 different bad checksums when checking them. Apparently, my CD burner is toast. Fortunately, I had an empty thumb drive handy and installed with that.

Since this laptop has a BroadCom wireless card, I needed to download the drivers. That's easy, just connect to my router directly... except my on-board ethernet isn't working... I even tried setting my IP manually, and nothing. I even booted an old Ubuntu disc I had to make sure it wasn't a bug in Karmic.

And now this morning, there is some kind of buzzing sound between my power plug and batter that goes on and off about once every 5 minutes, and is just loud enough to be both worrying and annoying, but at the same time, I think to myself "Meh. my laptop sounds like it's screwed. Nothing new here."

I'm now taking bets on what part breaks next.

/rant

[P4man]

My money is on the owner's patience breaking next :)

I hear nothing bad things from HP laptops. Especially their consumer grade laptops seem to be made from cardboard and shoestrings.

[iponeverything]

And how old is it?

I take it that you would not recommend hp..

I have always had good luck with thinkpads, at least the x series.

[undecim]

And how old is it?

I take it that you would not recommend hp..

I have always had good luck with thinkpads, at least the x series.

Less than a year old.

And no, I wouldn't recommend HP, at least not their touchscreen laptops.

[P4man]

Less than a year old.


Dont you have 1 or 2 years warranty no matter what? I know you said you opted out of it, but at least where I live, you are always protected from manufacturing defaults for 1 or 2 years, depending on the type of device.

Anyway, opting out of a guarantee for a laptop doesnt seem like a clever idea to me. on a PC you can usually repair and replace stuff yourself if needed, but on a laptop... they break often and you cant just go out and buy a new powersupply, motherboard or display for them in the local shop.

If the discount for opting out was significant, it may have given you an indication of how likely HP thought it was people need it.

[iponeverything]

I would have opt'ed out too and I would never expect an $800 laptop degrade so much in 1 year.. insane. The next think to go is going to be your credit card, to get a new machine..

[tom66]

I too have heard nothing but bad things about HP laptops. My sister's HP laptop's screen has mysteriously died - it's got a crack right across it (so she's forced to use an external monitor), it overheats when playing games and it is really noisy all the time. Someone else I know has had an onboard power supply failure.

I would always recommend buying a laptop warranty. Even with a reliable brand it's worth it, because often the parts cost more (sometimes more than the warranty!) when you buy from the OEM yourself.

[Seq]

I'm in posession of my Uncle's old HP tablet laptop. Tx1000 I believe. From what I read, they have a near-100% failure rate due to insufficient cooling. It currently still runs, though the hard disk failed, and the wifi burned itself out (no longer even recognized). I had a spare Mini-pcie wifi card handy, so I popped it in. Of course HP's BIOS refused to boot with a third-party component installed. Apparently if I was to throw down the money for an HP authorized wireless card, it would eventually fry due to the same heat issues.

I put another hard drive in, and was planning on trying the touchscreen in Ubuntu, but without wireless I haven't gotten around to it.

I would only recommend HP to people I don't like.

[tgalati4]

"The PC just got personal again."

[tom66]

"The PC just broke again."

I love HP's oscilloscopes and test equipment (I have a HP 54501A digitising 100 MHz oscilloscope, from 1988...), though that's now spun off into Agilent...

[Dropbear]

Laptop buying lesson 1. Get the extended warranty.

I have a HP Compaq Presario f500 which began having startup problems about 2 months post warranty. From what I've googled about the problem I'm lucky it even starts at all.

Hopefully I'll eventually be able to get a new (non HP) laptop.

[tgalati4]

I have two rules:

1. Avoid HP
2. Observe Rule #1.

[MaxIBoy]

For what it's worth, I'd steer clear of Toshiba too, my Satelite A205 has a mean time between failure of about four months. My two-year warranty recently expired, just in time for the monitor to break again. Lucky the external display still works.

Anyway, I'm liking my Thinkpad T510 so far, but I've only had it about a month, so I don't know how it will age...

[akand074]

I have the HP touchsmart Tx2 also, works like a charm and no problems once so ever yet. My cousin has the series right before mine and hes had it for almost two years and his girlfriend has the series right before his, and the only problem with it is that the screen is a little wobbly because shes very hard on it and its only on one axil.

My question is, what the hell do you do on your laptop.. that is ridiculous. Also are you using that small 12.1" laptop as your main computer? Because that is also not the best idea.

I find people are very biased when it comes to brands. You'll have people here talking about how terrible a brand is and never to get it because they personally have had problems with it. Just as many problems happen with every other brand. Actually, as of today generally HP is one of the highest sellers in laptops and known for their good quality. Especially more recently they have some phenomenal laptops in comparison to other brands. Other brands like Toshiba are just as good too generally, I'm just saying don't listen to people's biased opinions towards brands.

And like its been said earlier, if your still under one year your still covered in the manufacturers warranty and you should have them fix everything before it ends.

[themarker0]

Sell it on ebay as is.

[RiceMonster]

I'm not fond of HP for reasons like this. They seem to break easily. I know 2 people who've had the wireless card on their laptop burn up.

[undecim]

I guess it's time to raise the odds on my wireless card going next then...

Come to think of it, I've noticed a lot of heat from that area...

[mkendall]

I have a 3-4 year old HP dv4000 that I use exclusively and leave on for days/weeks at a time. The optical drive doesn't work, but that's because I dropped the laptop. Family members also have HP laptops and the main problems they have are due to Windows being a lousy OS/DE. So these warnings about HP products come as a surprise to me.

[del_diablo]

Opt out the free 2 year garanti, oh wait----- what country are you in?

[Ian dewhurst]

I have a 3-4 year old HP dv4000 that I use exclusively and leave on for days/weeks at a time. The optical drive doesn't work, but that's because I dropped the laptop. Family members also have HP laptops and the main problems they have are due to Windows being a lousy OS/DE. So these warnings about HP products come as a surprise to me.

I must say this comes as a surprise to me, the only failure a HD about 6 months ago.
I run a HP compaq 6715s and I've had it since High school so going on 6 years now.

[P4man]

If ALL hp's boke within a few years, they would be long bankrupt. But a general feeling i get is that recent HPs tend to break abnormally often, especially compared to lenovo's and the like. Of course one can have luck with an HP and bad luck with a thinkpad, but the odds are against that IMHO.

[tgalati4]

Thinkpads are relatively easy to repair and there are lots of parts available. What about HP?

Broken HP's are what keeps Lenovo in business.

[P4man]

Some numbers to back up the gut feeling (although the differences arent staggering, they are substantial):
http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/17/laptop-reliability-survey-asus-and-toshiba-win-hp-fails/

[WinterMadness]

you and me both man.

my laptop has so many issues luckily its been under warranty.

one time my hard drive failed along along with my screen being bad so i sent it to dell

i got it back and they were so gracious to tell me that my hard drive fails and they even put it in a little bag that said bad hard drive. Thankfully they paid for the shipping so that when I told them "No, I actually wanted a new hard drive.... what the hell good does this do me?"

They still havent fixed my screen. Dunno why.

One time my mother board fried because the fan went bad, they replaced everything and didnt plug the fan back in.

[del_diablo]

But a general feeling i get is that recent HPs tend to break abnormally often

Ain't this what is happening with every darned laptop, except possible the Macboooks and other quality brands?

[iponeverything]

Recently I picked up Thinkpad X200s, it is very cool running well built machine. I could have gone for one of the more affordable thinkpads, and spent half the cash - but I definitely learned my lessons on trying to save money - I always end up paying one way or another.

I definitely believe that buying a piece of equipment from a company with a decent reputation and picking something from one of their high-end product lines, stacks the chips in my favour as far as getting something that is not going to let me down.
I picked it up for my wife, and I can tell you from experience -- that the extra $400 I paid over choosing something else is nothing compared to the pain in the butt it would be if her machine died prematurely. I still googled around a lot looking for compatibility issues with Ubuntu, engineering problems, hardware failures and just general discontent with the machine that I was looking it.. because it was not a newly released product line there was plenty of time for information to filter out..

that said -- so far so good. She has already dropped it and spilled water on keyboard -- It still runs perfectly. Everything worked out of the box with a 9.10 install and xp runs great in virtualbox for her to vpn into her job..

She is so hard on machines I though of getting her a toughbook, but that thing weighs a ton and has all the style of a cinder block.