hey y'all, long time no see. i'm pretty sure my laptop's motherboard is fried - the USB ports don't work at all anymore. i haven't flashed new bios yet, but when they just stop working in the middle of the day i've found that it generally means something is screwed in there beyond just bios. the laptop is still under warranty, but i've taken it apart a few times, there's some missing screws inside, and i've replaced the hard drive with an SSD that doesn't have an "HP approved" sticker on it. for these reasons, i'd like to get them to send me a motherboard that i can install myself, rather than me having to send in my laptop. i've gotten dell to do this before without too much fuss, but hp doesn't seem to want to. any tips for dealing with them?
hmm... They may be less willing because you took it apart. Dosnt matter to them that you changed the HDD or not, they just see that it was tampered with. More or less its going to be hard dealing with them without a lot of finagling with support. You'll just have to talk to them to see if they would be willing to send the MOBO. But when it comes to laptops manufacturers can be sticklers on it cause they would rather not lose more money on something they have no knowledge of how it became 'broken'. Good luck, pull out the charm when you talk to them and stay positive. They'll respond better.
Which model is the laptop? Is it a pavilion series (dv****) and does it have nvidia graphics? If so its got the notorious nvidia defect and will fail completely at one point. Did you buy it directly from HP or from a retailer? I can't say enough bad things about HP but I'll resist. I'd recommend hplies.com but the website seems to have gone the way of the dodo. One guy who might be able to help is Paul (username: Lapcure) @ http://www.nvidiadefect.com/ Its a UK site and hence uses the UK law in order to help out HP owners but I think he was a long time member of hplies before he set-up his website so might be able to point you in the right direction.
According to the HP tech I spoke to, the only thing that would void my warranty was replacing the OS!! Wish I recorded that conversation.
Just run the diagnostics, call HP and give them the results. Don't mention you opened it and get the part sent out.
did you remove any void warranty stickers ? if not then you should be able to send it back. Personally id just put the old parts back in and send it back and play thick. generally though replacing HDD and RAM doesn't void warranty unless its some models of Mac (grrrrrrrr)
i don't have the old hard drive anymore, i sold it when i replaced it with the SSD. i don't think i went through any warranty void stickers, but i dunno. it's an HP DM4-1050ca, not one of those notoriously bad dv6000 pieces of garbage. i flashed the bios this morning and it didn't solve anything, so i guess i'm going to have to give them a call
no luck on getting just a motherboard, but i can take the hard drive out of the laptop before i send it back. i think i should be alright. thanks for the advice guys.
