I’ve been having an on going problem with my HP laptop throughout the past few months. I bought the laptop in June of 2007 from Best Buy in Boston, MA. I paid around $500 USD, for a 64 bit laptop, with 1 gig of RAM, 120 gig 5200rpm HD, Geforce go6150, dvdrw and vista 32 preinstalled… just the basics. Within a month of buying it, I got myself 4 gig of ram for $100 USD and that improved the machine performance. Off the top of my head, the vista scores were all 5’s except for my graphics score. That remained a little above 3 beucase we all know the Geforce go 6150 is not a strong contender. I was able to hack the nvidia drivers to have a full gig of RAM registered as shared video memory; my geforce go showed over a gig of video RAM. Not bad at all because my OS memory was not touched. Vista 32 bit still showed 2.5 gigs to the OS and 1 gig to the video card. Out of 4 gig on a 32 bit OS, 3.5 was being used. Whenever I booted Ubuntu 64, I had the full performance effect out of a budget laptop that look pretty.

I was happy for a while, but 3 months after I bought the machine, it would not post. The LEDS on the keyboard would light up, stay illuminated, flash once, stay illuminated flash once, perform that routine one more time then power off. HP’s support site gave the proper instructions to reseat the ram, pull the BIOS battery and power drain the machine to get it up again. 2 months later (we’re now 5 months down the road), I noticed the memory bay was extremely hot after 5 hours of continuous use and the machine went dead after I powered it off (I turned it off and a few hours later, I went to use it, but it was dead). After performing the 3 options above to kick start the machine, it powered up but the wireless memory card was dead. So I bought a USB wifi card and used that; I wasn’t upset because at the time Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy, didn’t have the proper drivers for me to get my wifi at 54Mbps. Even after recompiling the drivers it was a no go and I lived with 33Mbps Wifi. With the wireless USB card, I was able to have a full 54Mbps in Ubuntu and Vista.

The machine was good for another 7 months and then it all happened again. I noticed the heat, turned it off and then it would not turn on again. Now we’re at the full 12 month marker. I contacted HP’s tech support online through live chat and they told me to perform the 3 steps I did above. The machine is still dead and would not post. HP told me, my manufacture warranty has ended on the beginning of June, 2008. Considering what I’ve been through in the past year, they would service my laptop for free and make an exception because I’m calling during the month that my service ended.

I called HP on the 27^th of June.
They shipped me an empty Fedex box and I received it on the 28^th.
I packaged the laptop and dropped it off…….

PART ONE HAS COME TO AN END FOR NOW.