A friend of mine purchased a HP Pavilion dv2000 in early 2007. A month or so ago it began producing a series of beeps at boot up, after which it just hangs (no display). It produces one long beep followed by two short beeps which after some web searching is the notebook's signal for "my GPU is rooted".
As the HP only came with 1 year warranty I started scouring the web for possible solutions and find that the repair essentially requires the motherboard to be replaced so it needs to be taken back to HP.
I called HP support, waited on hold for 25 minutes for a CSR, only to be told that because the laptop is no longer under warranty I need to contact a local support centre. I'll note here that I spoke to the kind CSR for 15 minutes because as she explained "the systems are down" and she was unable to quickly determine whether this particular model qualified for HP's Limited Warranty Service Enhancement.
Note that the existence of that page would suggest its a well known issue but for whatever reason my particular dv2000 is not covered. Awesome.
So I called the local repair centre number provided by the CSR and discover its NCSS.com.au. The girl who answered was very quick to state that the up-front cost before any parts costs would be $150.15 (and she was very adamant about that 15c!). So I basically can't find how much it would cost to replace the motherboard unless I fork over $150.15.
But from the vast number of forum threads about this GPU issue is that the cost to repair is around US$400. And that HP replace your board with other known faulty boards that haven't yet failed -- as confirmed by folks who have had their mobo replaced not once, not twice, but three times for the same issue.
I enjoy a good customer service rant as much as anyone but the fun doesn't stop there. The things that really astound me about this little saga are that:
- on HP's own forums there is a thread with 596 posts about this issue
- there was a lawsuit filed against Nvidia for concealing this known issue
- HP themselves attempted to avoid the issue by producing a BIOS update that would run the system fans harder in order to reduce the likelihood of the known faulty GPUs failing, and finally
- there are loyal HP customers so desperate to fix this that they are taking apart their notebooks and baking their motherboards in their home ovens for 24+ hours in order to reflow the solder around the GPU -- which might temporarily fix the issue for a few months (read the comments on this blog post)
I don't really know what to make of this clusterf**k. You could avoid buying HP but the Nvidia issue affected many well known brands. Still, HP certainly doesn't earn any brownie points for providing no useful solution today.
