🚀 go-pugleaf

	HP released the Pavillion DV9200 series almost three
years ago.  The model has a number of questionable design issues.
The air intake is on the _bottom_ so if you *do* use it as a laptop
it quickly overheats.  The LCD hinges are configured so that the plastic
hinge covers rather than the hinges take the load generated by opening and
closing the lid and fail so often there's a grey market in the things. 
And of course their quality control seems to be...somewhat lacking.

	This machine failed early in its life due to a bad motherboard.
The customer sent it back to HP to have that repaired.  HP also replaced
the hinges while they had it (to save postage I guess).  When she got it 
back it wouldn't run for more than 10 minutes at a time.  That's the first
time I saw it.

	When HP had replaced the motherboard they'd neglected to torque
the heatsink retaining screws.  Of course unlike a Thinkpad you have to 
disassemble the entire unit down to the bare frame to GET at the heatsink.
I torqued the heatsink and blew some cat hair out of the fan and she was
ok.  For about a month.  Then the LCD failed.  Too bad, only a 1 year
warranty.  Ok, replaced it with a third-party part.  ($600 for an
LCD that might last another whole year?  Ha ha)  She came back next month 
because the disc drive had completely failed.

	Well, MTBF doesn't mean it's guaranteed to run for 50,000 hours I guess.
So I ordered the HP DV9205us Recovery Disc Set and a new drive.  When it came
I booted the thing told it yes, I know I will lose all my valuable data if
I proceed, and watched it spin through about 2 hours of repair - bringing
up all the pretty Vista screens and happily rebooting half a dozen times - 
until it stops dead with a blue screen: UNMOUNTABLE BOOT VOLUME.

	Ok, that's wierd.  Examining the thing shows that indeed, it's 
completely scribbled.  And no amount of contortion will cause it to complete,
not creating my own partitions, not killing their stupid recovery manager and
trying the operations by hand, nothing.  Turns out that this is a known
problem.  There's a bug in the recovery discs that were produced for these
systems.  HP's website says "If this happens request a supplemental recovery
disc".

	But HP tech support says "WE never heard of that.  If the recovery
disc wont' recover the notebook then you'll need to send it back for
Expensive Out Of Warranty Repairs.  Thanks and have a nice day."  Even if you
point out that there's an entry in the Hp Official FAQ about this and that
you purchased the recovery disc set YESTERDAY they refuse to admit the error.

	I can un-brick the laptop by installing Vista by hand, turning a
30 minute job into 4 hours of nursemaiding a stupid Windows box. My
professional advice is Avoid HP Notebooks (I haven't had much luck with their
high-end crap either, especially those damned blade servers).  HP Notebooks
are poorly engineered, cut a lot of corners in production (PLASTIC hinges
for the LCD lid?  Jeez...), and are totally impossible to work on - you can't
replace anything without disassembling the ENTIRE unit.  This woman has two
of these that she uses in her business and each has had more than one
major and out of warranty failure in the  2 to 3 years she's owned them.
And she's not the only customer I have with those problems.  I'm going to 
refuse to work on HP's any more.  It's bad for my blood pressure.

	A perfect example of why American companies can't compete.  I
never use anything except Lenovo anyway but I feel sorry for the people
that drag this kind of sub-standard crap in and want to get it fixed.