My dad gave me a call this morning saying that his laptop stopped working. After a few iterations of his story, I extracted that he had left it on but idle for a few hours the day before and now when he turns it on, the lights blink and it shuts back down. I found that this was a common problem for his laptop model* (go HP!) and it was covered by a ‘Special Enhanced’ warranty beyond the one year standard warranty.
Its says that they will send out a shipping container and pay for the shipping and repair and will return it in 10-14 business days. It also says that it’s a problem with BIOS fan control which, to me, invokes images of component cases and solder joints go snap, crackle, pop and melty things. He called HP as soon as I relayed the information and, of course, he was told to call back tomorrow because “our computers are down”. :dubious:
Not a good start, but I have never dealt directly with HP, I just know the reputation. So I was wondering what experiences other people have had with HP laptop warranty repairs. How long did it actually take? Did you get back your laptop or a different one? Was it properly repaired?
*HP Pavilion DV6000 year and a half old
We had the exact same issue this past November. Hubby was using the computer and put it down, and poof…the lights and everything was on, but the monitor was blank. Both being fairly competent techies, we did everything we could to figure out what was wrong. About a week or two after we gave up and figured we had a good run on the machine (year and a half for an $800 machine), my hubby happened to find on the HP website that exact link you posted. I don’t know how I managed to miss it when I looked other than it must of have just been posted.
I called HP to discuss repair, and about 3 phone calls later - the last being about an hour of diagnosis (can you remove the battery for me…do you feel comfortable removing the memory and reseating it). With the last call I just went ‘Uh huh…I did it…’ of course taking the amount of time it would to do it, I just pretended I did it- because we’d done all that stuff already!
There was always a problem with their system. It was slow to take information, and slow to retrieve anything while I was on the phone. They couldn’t tell me when they’d ship the box, and to call back for that information. I was really wondering if their service would be any better. The box came the next day even though the person I talked to couldn’t find it in the system.
We were given a window of 14 business days to fix the computer, and that came with an update on day 13 it would take another 14 days to fix. Of course we were pleasantly surprised when it was actually fixed about 3 days later (17 days). The laptop came back looking just as we had sent it - except they had to wipe the computer.
I was happy with the turnaround time on the laptop, but extremely frustrated with the customer service aspect.
With regards to backing up any info before sending it off, we bought a device from newegg that allowed us to get the info from the HD. You just put the sata drive in it, and you can access the info. (Can probably find the exact info again if you’re interested.)
Good luck - in the end, we’re happy we have a laptop again!