Thursday

March 10, 2010 at 1:47pm

The issue with the dv2000/dv6000 series of HP Laptops that was affected by this service advisory all had nVidia chipsets (systemboard chipsets, not specifically GPUs). There was a seperate issue with some of the mobile 8600 GPU's but that's not what this issue is about.

The chipset in the unit would fail, causing several different possible faults. On the mild end of the spectrum, the unit would lose WiFi. The affected chipset sits directly below the WiFi card and the slot would die, not the card itself. There were also numerous different boot issues (no P.O.S.T., unit would P.O.S.T. but have no display on external or internal but audio cues pointed to unit actually powering on, unit powers on for 3 seconds then powers off immediately, etc.) We also saw random shutdowns, but that was a rare one, generally caused by the chipset overheating but not actually completly failing yet.

Once repaired, we were seeing reworks at a rate of close to 33%. That is too high for industry standards in my opinion.

For customers that experienced this defect, HP provided a 12 month extension to the original warranty, and the program officially ended in late 2008 if I remember correctly. nVidia footed the bill for the repair so that to me is a clear admission of fault. What makes me wonder now is that all of these units are at least 2.5 years old at this point. If a manufacturer provides a one year warranty and then extends that warranty for an additional 12 months to cover these issues, what is their legal obligation to a consumer after that? I could see a customer having a legit gripe if their unit had been fixed several times and it failed again, but on a first time failure, how could you show it was the result of a manufacturers defect and not just age? And who would really be on the hook here? HP as the OEM or nVidia, the supplier of the bad motherboard chipset?

I'm not sure...I just know that I fixed a metric ton of them...lol.