I received my HP notebook back last week, and short of finishing replastering and repainting my bathroom the next few weekends I can spend time again developing software on this schedule.
Unfortunately my notebook is a DV9000 series (DV9233eu to be precise) which has a known design fault that kills the wifi and then the GPU part of the northbridge on the mainboard. The winning combo known to be the cause of the problem is a Geforce GPU and an AMD processor, which probably covers some 30-40% of the notebooks HP have made in the last 3 years
HP replaced the mainboard with (I believe) one of the same revision.
At least it was free - HP agreed to extend my one year warranty by another year for this fault free of charge, and I'm in the UK (no visible recall/extended warranty programme here unlike the US).
HP were very fast (4 working days turnaround) and dealt with the entire thing via email. It's just a shame that the dozy courier gave my laptop to a complete stranger at my work to sign for (hundreds of employees). Luckily it still found its way to me because of a note with my name on I left on the notebook (see below)
The way I see it, if the HP breaks again with the same fault, I'll buy a Dell, otherwise HP will get my money. I think that's fair.
Oh and one more thing - if you send HP your notebook without the hard disk tell the HP contact before you send it and leave a paper note on the machine to the effect that you have confidential client data on it and had to remove it. The HP contact told me that the engineers sometimes refuse to fix them without a hard disk so she had to add a case note on the system and recommended I add the paper note! The engineers also did not do any QA on the return checklist citing "N/A no hard disk" - do they not even have a boot CD?!
