Never buy an HP

So, I’ve always strongly believed against buying from HP. While they make appealing products, in terms of looks and price points, I’ve always just found them to disappoint in the end. They just aren’t built to last.

I’ve always known this, but a little over a year ago, I really needed a new laptop, and against my better judgement, bought an HP DV2416. It had everything I needed, and didn’t look ugly. I figured, if anything, it had to last at least a 1.5/2 years before crapping out on me.

Installing Ubuntu on this machine sucked majorly, mainly due to the unsupported and badly built (later recalled) motherboard, unsupported nVidia graphics card, and motherboard killing Broadcom wireless card (all unknown at the outset). But things worked, and I had to admit, I was incredibly productive.

Four months in, my harddrive died. This was mainly my fault. I tried opening my laptop, but the entire laptop came with it, and subsequently hit the table hard from two inches up. Placing the HD in a position of first contact was a horrible design idea, in my opinion, but I couldn’t complain too much. I was able to salvage my work and awaited my new harddrive, which unfortunately took a few weeks to come.

Again, I reinstalled and resumed my productivity with Ubuntu. As the summer approached, my laptop’s fans started to get louder, and the laptop warmer. I figured I just needed to clean out the fan, an unfortunate circumstance, but doable. Over the next two months, my laptop would start to shutdown or freeze at odd times. It didn’t make much sense. It seemed to always happen whenever my wireless card was on and I used the internet heavily. After a while, the laptop would refuse to start up, only showing blinking LED lights while the fan ran. This time I had to send the laptop in for repairs. Oh yeah, somehow the harddrive had crapped out again.

I didn’t receive my laptop back for a month and a half. Ridiculous. When I got it back, I realized Ubuntu might be causing some issues as it just couldn’t play nice with the motherboard or wireless, so I had to settle on running XP. I haven’t been as productive since, but I set up a decent enough environment that was easily replicable if anything happened again.

Unfortunately, the heat sync in my laptop recently refused to start. It not starting means even the most menial tasks can raise my cpu temperature high enough that my computer will shutdown automatically and be unbearable to touch.

Anyways, somehow I was able to get customer support to fix my laptop again, although I have no idea when I’ll get it back, or if they’ll even fix the problem. This essentially has put a hold on a project I was hoping to deploy and has sharply reduced my productivity.

In all, of the 16 months I’ve owned this laptop, I’ve been unable to use it for about two and a half months, which will continue to grow…

In conclusion: stay away from HP.