By Dennis O’Reilly

Some laptop vendors, discovering they’d sold machines with chips that overheat, respond by immediately replacing the defective units.

Unfortunately, if you bought one such notebook from certain companies and the motherboard burned itself out just after the warranty expired, you may have found yourself out of luck.

In an April 9 Top Story, WS contributing editor Michael Lasky described the reticence of Dell and HP to replace an overheating Nvidia graphics chip in many of the companies’ laptop models. My April 16 Known Issues column provided more information for people who had bought one of the defective notebooks.



While both vendors claim to have addressed their customers’ complaints on this matter, reader Eric Koglin begs to differ:

• “I began wrestling with the problem, because I was trying to troubleshoot my brother-in-law’s nonfunctioning HP DV9000 laptop.… I also discovered a site called HPLies.com. It has become a gathering place for people from all around the world to describe their laptop problems … and to inventory in a database the serial numbers, product numbers, dates of purchase, etc., of defective HP laptops.
  
  “While the database may contain only around a thousand entries, the actual number [of affected machines] is in the thousands and has hit people in all corners of the world. It appears that the HP ‘help’ described in Mr. O’Reilly’s article and on the HP Web site applies only to an extremely small subset of problem laptops.…
  
  “HP has continued to put its corporate head in the sand. The people who leave messages in the forums on HPLies.com describe efforts to work with HP support people, send letters to Mark Hurd (CEO of HP), and take the computer back to the place it was purchased, with limited or no success.
  
  “It appears that the HP support people have been directed not to acknowledge that there’s a widespread problem with laptops and [also] to perform a $400 ‘repair’ which, as it turns out, means that HP replaces the bad part with the same bad-but-functioning replacements.… They also reformat the hard drive (huh?) and modify the BIOS in such a manner as to make the cooling fan run continuously to try to keep the unit from overheating! So of course, the battery life of the laptop is crippled even more.
  
  “The forum members on HPLies.com have written to the Better Business Bureau, state attorneys general, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and directly to Mark Hurd, to no avail.…
  
  “I think it’s a substantial issue. HP is turning its corporate back on its customers. I see why HP doesn’t care — they’re the largest computer maker in the world now, so I guess a few thousand unhappy customers is par for the course. This issue is important, because HP knowingly and willfully sold defective merchandise and in most cases charged the customer for the repair.
  
  “HP should be held accountable for knowingly putting a defective computer on the market and for turning a deaf ear to its customers.”
  
  

As the owner of a doorstop that was once an HP notebook with the defective chip, I couldn’t agree more. When I complained about the problem to HP support, they offered to sell me a new motherboard for half the normal $400 price. But, as Eric points out, the “repair” HP proposed was hardly a bargain.

Windows Secrets contacted HP for a response to Eric’s letter, but no reply has been received. Frankly, HP’s silence on the matter is no big surprise.

Eric will receive a gift certificate for a book, CD, or DVD of his choice for sending a tip we printed. Send us your tips via the Windows Secrets contact page.

The Known Issues column brings you readers’ comments on our recent articles. Dennis O’Reilly is technical editor of WindowsSecrets.com.

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