New HP Pavilion DV5-1003nr Notebook: Bad...

Apr 20, 2009

- Hello, Geekman.

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my plight. :-)

The only OEM computers I have owned before receiving this HP DV5-1003nr notebook (which HP has discontinued, incidentally), were Macintosh computers. (Actually, the first computer I bought was a Commodore-64 in 1984. It was more reliable than this piece of dreck from HP, and it still works!)

The analogue board in my Macintosh SE died, but I used that computer 16-18 hours per day to volunteer for IGC.org and iEARN.org, most of the time to access SunOS (UNIX) servers via 'telnet' to do administrative work via the shell and Perl 4. I expect that I kept the computer in use so much that I exceeded the MTBF for the analogue board, which my local Apple dealer repaired without charging me for labor.

I upgraded the SE to an SE/30, and soon added a color video card (the last still made for the SE/30) and a 14-inch Apple/Trinitron monitor -- just in time to switch from creating Gopher servers for nonprofits (using 'vi' and the UNIX shell) to hand-coding W3C-valid HTML to create Web sites with color and images just before NCSA's Mosaic browser was first released. The SE/30 still works and looks new.

I bought a second-generation Power Macintosh and spent almost as much on a G3 processor upgrade as I did on the computer. My "stealth G3" is still working, but I purchased a "Graphite" G4 Power Mac tower in 2001, the last Macintosh shipped with Mac OS 9.2.

I bought Mac OS X the day it was released but had disconvered a random popping noise whenever I tried to use iTunes and Roxio Toast on my new G4 to back up my rare and out-of-print classical music CDs (so that I could play the copies in my car's CD player).

It was the first problem I'd had with a Macintosh since wearing out the analogue board on the SE. Reinstalling Mac OS 9.2 and trying multiple variations did not resolve the problem. My local Apple dealer's technicians were also baffled.

On the Sunday before I was going to call Apple Support on Monday, I received e-mail from Apple, asking me to select the URL in the message and to fill out a customer survey about my experience with my new Mac. I mentioned the random pops, the hours I'd spent on the problem, and that my local Apple service technicians were unable to diagnose or repair the problem.

I received a phone call at work from a high-level customer care manager at Apple, who was very upset and apologetic. The next day my new Mac and the original CDs and the copies were picked up at my office by FedEx.

The representative at Apple called me at least twice each day with updates, after ensuring I could accept personal calls at work and had time. He had assigned 3 or 4 Apple engineers to do nothing but work on my Power Mac, but he decided that four days without results was too long to keep me waiting.

He asked my permission to keep the Mac so that the engineers -- who also had never encountered this issue -- could diagnose the problem to ensure that "another Apple customer does not have this problem, even if we discover a design flaw."

The new "Silverlight" G4 Power Mac towers were out and I was asked if I would accept one of these new -- and much faster -- models as a replacement, configured with the extra features I had added to the "Graphite" G4 (including the 10,000-RPM UltraSCSI-160 hard drive, because I had gotten used to the speedy, reliable SCSI drives that were standard in every Macintosh until the G4 line...although I learned that professional video editors were using the standard IDE drives with no problems).

I gratefully agreed, was told all new Power Macs shipped with Mac OS X (and Mac OS 9.2), and my customized new Power Mac received a second inspection by senior Apple engineers. In addition, my original RAM configuration was doubled as "a gift of apologize and appreciation for your patinence."

Although I abandoned Windows (XP Pro) almost four years ago for Linux, I built all of my "Wintel" computers myself, starting with the first one I bought on which I decided to install Windows NT 4 (which had at least 6 service packs) instead of the more popular Windows 98, which I usually saw crashing. WinNT had no hardware detection whatsoever and resolving IRQ conflicts was my biggest challenge. Once I had the IRQs assigned properly, however, Windows NT proved to be very stable. I do not recall a "Blue Screen of Death."

The gift of this HP Pavillion DV5-1003nr Entertainment PC in August 2008 proved to me that building my own PCs since 1998 (for Windows and Linux) had been worth the time. My first experience owning OEM hardware preloaded with Windows has proven to be a horrible nightmare -- although I have never heard of anyone building a laptop or notebook PC from scratch. ;-)

In the United States, Geekman, our counterpart to Australia's Consumer Affairs Department is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). I have already been gathering together my notes and working on the draft of the text for the formal complaint I do plan to file with the FTC.

I have had successful resolutions after filing previous formal complaints with the FTC. In those cases, the vendors who failed to provide an item for which I paid or sent the wrong item -- and had ignored my efforts to reach a resolution -- quickly resolved the issues after receiving letters from the FTC (which apparently frighten at least small businesses).

If this notebook does not fail before I can back up my data (yet again), mail written complaints to the FTC about HP and Best Buy -- because the convenient on-line form is not set up to handle a complaint against two entities and it will be easier for the FTC to process a single complaint with all documentation in a single envelope -- plus, I have the postal addresses for the consumer relations offices at HP and Best Buy, and I have found that sending a copy a complaint to the FTC to the responsible parties is effective (although HP and Best Buy obviously will not be intimidated and have armies of attorneys, so perhaps I will not use the tactic in this instance). :-)

Given the fact that HP has discontinued this model of notebook, I am going to demand a new model (not a repair of this notebook or a refurbished replacement). Given the totally inexcusable duration of this nightmare -- and the psychologicaly and physical suffering for which HP and Best Buy are directly responsible .

I am debating asking for a a replacement notebook with a WSXGA+ display instead of the WXGA+ that has, in itself, made using this notebook for serious work impossible: I do not have an IDE that leaves me any space for source code on a screen that is only 800 pixels high! I hate wide-screen displays because I find them useless, for writing source code, SGML, XHTML, or using Photoshop or The GIMP on Linux (although I cannot replace Vista with Linux on this notebook until the warranty expires).

The optical drive in this notebook is intolerably slow for creating data DVDs. Either the Blu-Ray feature (which added $159 US to the cost of the PC, and I will never watch ANY DVDs with it) does something to reduce the write speed to data DVDs or the the notebook's hardware issues affect the optical drive, or the drive is bad. I have a first-generation Sony dual-layer DVD-RW optical drive (which was Sony's patented technology, just as Blu-Ray is) that I got on sale in 2002 for over $200 US, but I was using SuSE Linux Pro at the time (before Novell and Microsoft ruined SuSE) and paid for the two, dual-layer DVD set (mainly because it included a large printed administration guide and a nice user's guide). That drive on a 2.2-GHz Pentium-4 system without hyper-threading and 1-GB of PC2100 RAM can burn a data DVD much, much faster than this "modern" Blu-Ray drive.

Thank you, again, Geekman. I apologize for my rambling narrative, but if I can afford a notebook computer in the future, I will buy one made by Apple, even if it is refurbished -- unless "DIY" notebook/laptop computer parts become available as they are for building desktop and server computers, which I seriously doubt will happen, especially since people seem to want ultra-tiny, ultra-portable computers. (Perhaps smartphones and notebook computers will eventually converge.)

Cordially,

David
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<http://ddickerson.igc.org/>
<http://www.iearn.org/>