Fuck HP!!!

The BBQ Pit
1

You bastards! My god-damned-mother-fucking HP Laptop is two months out of warranty. Last night, when I booted up, it started making noises, and, praise Jebus, the hard drive is dying!!!

So, when I call tech-support, of course they aren’t willing to offer any grace-period on the warranty, even though I think we can all agree that a HD shouldn’t be just self-destructing after a year and a few months. Of course the bastards suggest that I buy a replacement from them for a measley $380, over a third of the total price I paid for the laptop anyway and of course way-above the actual cost of replacing the HD.

At any rate, I request all of the technical spec’s of the HD so that I can go out and buy a new one from somebody else. The Indian tech-support crew is totally clueless, so I get transfered over to the parts department where they assure and promise me five-ways till tomorrow that they can tell me all of the dimensions for a HD to purchase. But, of course, the parts people don’t have a fucking clue, so I’m left trying to get back with the tech support, and they have no fucking clue, nobody has any fucking clue, and god-damn HP!!!

Uhhhhggg… anyway, if anyone has some knowledge that can help me out, here’s all I know:

It’s an HP Pavillion ze4400 laptop
3.5" inch form-factor for the HD
12.7 mm height

But what nobody seems to know is if that 12.7mm height is the drive itself or the whole box it comes in, or what some appropriate replacement drives might be.

Specififically, will this drive here work?
http://www.etech4sale.com/products/partinfo-id-116843.html

It says it’s just oven an inch in height or 1/3H. Is this the same as a 12.7 mm height?

My god, I’m swear I’m going to hop onto a plane with that stupid laptop, show up at the tech-support place, smash it through a window, and rip the still-grinding hardrive from the laptop as it shreiks in pain and ask, “How big is the hard drive now motherfucka’s, how big is it?”

If the fuckers just weren’t trying to make at least twice market value on the replacement HD’s by making it impossible to figure out what type of HD you actually need, I wouldn’t be so annoyed.

2

[QUOTE=threemae]
… the hard drive is dying!!!/QUOTE]
I don’t think the one your checking out is the correct one…12.7 MM is about one half inch.
Get the model number off your drive and google it. The info you need will come up.

3

Notebook drives are 2.5" rather than 3.5" form factor, so the one you linked to won’t work.

Most (all?) new drives will be 9.5mm high rather than 12.7 - this should not be a problem.

The Maintenance and Service guide for your model appears to be here: http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c00246219.pdf

There is a table that should let you look up the HP part # for your drive, if you google on that you will find other vendors who sell that exact model for less than HP if you want an exact replacement.

But realistically, any 2.5" notebook drive should work–I would start shopping here:

4

Try a Hitachi DK23EA-40 ($130) at www.priorityelectronics.com 1-800-331-3224. The sticking point is whether your interface is ATA-5 or the last EIDE, but their tech people should be able to tell you. Its a 9mm height, but will go in your bay.

Hope this helps.

5

Do be careful about replacing your HDD with a different model. You use a laptop so you’ll need to check things like power consumption and heat generation.

6

Here is a link to a seller for the same make and model hard drive that’s in your laptop. If you feel like consulting with an admin, they could tell you where this post originated from, and perhaps that might make you feel better about HP.

-lv

7

Alright, thank you all for your help and information. I was able to use the links and manuals to deduce that my hard-drive is indeed a Toshiba MK4021GAS, and when I finally managed to get a screw-driver to crack it, I was able to confirm it. NewEgg has one for a rather reasonable $72.00. I’m still going to harass Toshiba tomorrow to try to get a new drive for free, because the bearings/motor/whatever that failed shouldn’t have failed after just one year and a few months, but $72.00 is a hell of a lot better than $380.

I still hate HP, but I love this board and all of you. Damnit, I’m getting all teary-eyed.

Finally, one last question: is there any chance what-so-ever that I might be able to just replace the motor or whatever in the drive rather than the discs themselves, because I really don’t want to have to go through the hassle of reinstalling all my software and losing some data. Thank you all so much again!

8

Long story short, there’s no user replaceable parts in a hard drive. There are exceptions but you need to be an uber hardware geek to even think about it.

If your drive is working now, and if you have a CD burner in your laptop, then you may be able to use Symantec Ghost to burn an image of your current hard drive and then restore it onto your new hard drive. This software will cost you some cash, but it could make life easier.

9

So you seriously thought they would forgoe their clearly written policy, just because you felt it was unfair that your drive broke? What world are you living in?

I’m also not sure why you’re so pissed at HP. Their phone reps have to be able to handle basic questions about every conceivable HP (and Compaq, technically) product. While they certainly should have known that there’s only one ‘size’ hard drive used in laptops nowadays, you seem to be overreacting just a touch. An e-mail to an HP rep would have gotten you the info in no time flat. Even easier, you could have removed the drive and searched for the spare part number on HP’s site. Furthermore, all modern hard drives have the manufacturer, capacity, etc. written right on them.

If your computer’s out of warranty, you’re going to have to expect to expend a small amount of elbow grease to fix any problems.

10

In general, if a line of hard drive has less than 1% in the first year, or 2% in the second year, it’s considered acceptible. The vast majority of all failures related to workmanship happen within the first couple of months of usage. While it’s possible that there was a real manufacturing defect that showed up after a year of use, it’s more likely that the drive experienced, um, external stress that shortened its life.

I’m not saying that you dropped it, just saying that the warrenty isn’t longer because then the manufacturer would have to pay for all the people that drop theirs as well as paying for the odd defect that takes over a year to show up.

-lv

11

There’s really no way to repair the drive–even if you knew which part were bad, you’d probably have to buy a whole new drive for parts, and would likely end up with two non-working drives.

If you really need the data, you could consider a data-recovery company, but the price is steep, probably at least $2k. The good news is that in my experience they don’t charge you if they can’t recover the data.

Have you tried the freezer trick? Depending on what wrong with your drive, it may buy you enough time to get your data off.

12

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

13

I feel your pain- a very small part of it anyways. I had to replace both the monitor and the dvd rom in my computer - when it was 13 months and 2 days old. I think there is some kind of self destruct built it that activates when the warranty expires.

14

The laptop that I bought Mr. Pundit last year blew up 10 days before the 1 year warranty expired. They picked it up on Thursday and it was back to him on Monday. And, yes, I was hopping mad when it happened.

Costco doesn’t offer extended warranties as far as I know, but it doesn’t matter cause I wouldn’t have bought it. My philosophy is this: You sell a quality product that I’m willing to fork out large American dollars to purchase. Thus we’re both happy. You sell crapola and then refuse to repair it to my satisfaction, then you’ve lost yourself a loyal customer.

No, a laptop should not bug out a year after purchase. If my husband’s $1500 laptop would have broken down a month AFTER the warranty expired, and they refused to repair it at cost, they would have received such a scathing letter from me that their eyes would have blistered.

Ask the folks at Chrysler. I’ll never buy another Chrysler product as long as I live. In the short run, they saved themselves the cost of installing yet another transmission (after 70k miles). In the long run, they lost a loyal customer.

Bottom line: Make a good product, stand behind that product and you’ll have no trouble keeping returning customers.

15

One in which we all were born as his debtors, I reckon. I wondered the same thing myself.

16

But here’s the thing, if you were looking for the highest quality product, you wouldn’t have bought the $1500 hp model, you’d have bought the $2000 IBM model. In general, I’m trying to make the point that one of the reasons why everybody from HP and Dell to GE and Whirlpool are selling cheaper, lower-quality stuff is because more people buy it. Heaven forbid it if companies sell what people want to buy.

17

Having calmed down a bit afterwards, no, I realize that these things do have a tendency to just plain break, even with a stated MTBF at 300,000 hours and 5 year warranties when sold via retail. And they didn’t have to replace it, but a HD failure is a stressful event where one tends to freak out and wonder how long it will take to get stuff back up to speed. I couldn’t open the computer for a day because I didn’t have the right type of screwdriver, and I’ve since learned that I can buy a replacement drive from NewEgg for $72.

But this is what pisses me off even more regarding HP. They just didn’t have the replacement readily available, and also tried to sell me a replacement that was well over five times what the drive retails for. They simply gave me the wrong information about what type of drive to purchase, and that would have cost me even more money.

Anyway, I should mention that a SDMB’er happened by this thread and sent me a personal e-mail offering a chance to submit a complaint to their “crisis response team” and I was given a call this morning apologizing, etc. So, thanks to them.

Also, I’m in the process of trying to twist Toshiba’s arm into replacing the drive, since, hey, it’s their bearings that went to crap.

Thanks again, everyone.

18

Our global HQ is reporting HD failures of 10%+ of HP NC6000’s. These machines were around a year old. We’ve seen lots of failures in our office as well.

Shoddy shit.

19

Well, good to know that it’s not just me. I take good care of the laptop, and it has never been dropped.

Quartz, what can I say? I read that article and laughed some evil maniacal laughter.

20

For anyone who hasn’t tried to find something via HP’s website, it’s a cruel labyrinth of evil that has a tendency to send you to a page to buy a new hp product, regardless of what you’re trying to do. I already have an HP product, it isn’t working, and that’s why I’m here. At this exact moment, I’m not really in the mood to buy another HP product.

Threemae , I definitely feel your pain. You might try talking to someone at HP, on occasion they will sell an extended warranty after you’ve owned the product for a while. I would post my current problem with the company, but I’m trying to keep mum and keep my fingers crossed until my baby computer is all fixed. With all the problems we’ve had, my entire family (we’re even talking extended here) has decided to no longer be an HP family.

A friend of mine has the view that computers are like toothbrushes, each person should have their own and that’s how it is at my house. Hopefully (knock on a gigantic piece of very large and sound wood) it’ll be a long time before we need to buy a computer again.

Oh, and about calling HP customer service or looking in their manual; I had a friend on the phone for over three hours straight, simply trying to acquire a recovery disk and he was shuttled from department to department. Want to guess where he ended up? The first department he spoke with. As far as the manuals go, mine is contradictory. You have this, no wait! You don’t, tee hee we were wrong. Psych! You do have. No we were just kidding, ad nauseum.

Finally, the backlash has already started, my best friend who is also part of an HP family we to a completely different company when they purchased a laptop. HP lost a very, very dedicated client when that family left because of all the problems my machine has had.