HP finally came through in the end, and it looks like the left-hinge issue is completely resolved!
My sincerest thanks to Murray at the Case Manager group for watching-over the whole process.
Boy, was that close! I will really need the laptop when I attend CES 2009 in a few weeks!
I boxed up the laptop last night (Sunday), and Jana was able to get it down to one of the FedEx locations nearby for shipment back to HP.Â
Hopefully they’ll get it later tomorrow and we can get a decent start on the 5-7 day repair cycle that HP needs.
Update: Per the FedEx tracking number, they have received the shipment in less than 15 hours. Pretty quick!
Well, I didn’t get any further response from Bill Robbins from Porter Novelli in the last day and a half. So I decided to followup on this. Granted, it’s already 5:45pm, so I don’t really expect a response tonight…
By the same token, I can’t really afford to wait on this, as I hope to cover CES 2009 January 8th thru the 11th, and that’ll be hard to do without a laptop. I figure if I wait too long, then my package will have to compete with all of the Christmas mail traffic. Sigh…
Thank you Cringely! Hopefully more folks suffering from this particular problem with their DV9000 laptop will hear about it and take-up HP’s offer for a free repair!
Kudos to Robert X. Cringely: http://weblog.infoworld.com/robertxcringely/archives/2008/12/hewlett_packard.html
UPDATE: Just got word from Robert X Cringely that an HP Representative is interested in “helping to resolve my problemâ€. Most excellent!
Got a e-mail from Robert X Cringely asking how things went. I had to admit that I’m a little afraid of sending my laptop in without having first backed-up the system via Ghost or something similar.
I told him as much, so I guess he’s going to do an article on it later today. Let’s see what happens…
Well, the Free shipping kit has arrived. This is for the HP DV-9000 that I need to send back to HP for a warranty repair.
Some included documentation clarifies the issue greatly. As I had originally hoped, they indicate on one of the enclosed forms that they will only perform an OS Restoration if they have to, not as a first resort as my good friend Al had insisted in the first place.
However, now I have a problem. Al said one thing, and now I have a document that says another. Which am I to believe? I sincerely want to believe the document, but after all that has transpired, I can’t really be sure of anything from HP.
The one constant that I am still looking into is a good backup solution. I’ve got plenty of backup storage space, but what I’d like to just perform a Ghost Backup of the entire drive and if the unit comes back with any missing files, I can just restore the image…
Well, I just got off the phone with Al, the friendly HP representative who tried to convince me that if I sent my DV9000 laptop in for a free repair, that they will absolutely positively have to re-image my system.
Care to guess what needs to be repaired? A defective Hard Drive? Negative. An all-important Motherboard? Nope, guess again.
Believe it or not, the problem is that a left-side hinge that is defective and falling causing my laptop to tear itself apart internally. You can see in the image to the left that the inner and outer shell surrounding the LCD is being forced apart at the hinge.
Apparently HP is well aware of this issue; I’m guessing the failure rate was incredibly high, and they wanted to avoid a class-action lawsuit.
Now, I could see that if I were submitting my laptop for repair of the motherboard or Harddrive that they *might* have to reload the factory image on the Harddrive in order to work with a known quantity at a particular level of quality, but this is just plain insane.
For grins, I decided to e-mail a copy of the original notification e-mail that HP sent me to “Robert X. Cringely†at InfoWorld Magazine. I guess that we’ll have to see what happens…
Don’t mind me, I’m just messing around trying to find a good backup solution to back-up my hard-drive prior to submission to HP…