HP Pavillion Laptop Drops Connection

Professor Snugglesworth

While I work on putting an end to my PC problems, my sister has come to me with problems of her own. She's been the owner of this HP Pavillion DV6000 Notebook for about two years now, and I personally find it to be a waste of a good computer considering how much little she uses it for. It's basically for her school, and according to her she visits maybe three websites at the most.

Well regardless, she's been having issues where her connection drops. She's using the notebook's built-in network adapter to connect to the house's Comcast service, but for some odd reason it keeps dropping, most notably in the evening.

She's left it to me to figure out the problem, but my solutions so far haven't worked. For a temporary solution, I either disconnect the main router for about a minute (hardly works), or I uninstall the network adapter from her Device Manager, then let the notebook automatically install it (works after a couple attempts). I even tried reinstalling Vista on her notebook, and spent about 3 hours bringing it up to date (she doesn't update often), as well as keeping Spybot running from the start.

The problem persists, and I'm out of ideas. Any suggestions?

Rhakyr

If its the wireless adapter causing the problem HP has released a service note about this issue and should repair it for free up to 2 years after purchase instead of the normal 1. With a quick search of good I couldn't find the documentation but I know the service alert number is 07122001.

Professor Snugglesworth

Interesting. I'll try and search their website about this. I just hope they don't require too much documentation. I doubt she's kept the receipt, or even the box. She isn't very tidy about stuff like that.

Rhakyr

I work at a Best Buy Geek Squad and regularly send HP notebooks with that problem to them and I've never needed to send a receipt or even state the date of purchase, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem

wunderbar

Rhakyr wrote: »

I work at a Best Buy Geek Squad and regularly send HP notebooks with that problem to them and I've never needed to send a receipt or even state the date of purchase, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem

totally off topic, but the irony of you giving Snugglesworth help actually just made my day. He's been given absolutely awful advice by best buy geek squad people in his other thread you can find on the front page of this forum.

now I have no reason to doubt you, and after googling a bit, I see that you're totally right abouth the HP laptop issues, but it's still hilarious.

PeregrineFalcon

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01087277&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=1842189&lang=en

HP has identified a hardware issue with certain HP Pavilion dv2000/dv6000/dv9000 and Compaq Presario V3000/V6000 series notebook PCs
...
The notebook does not detect wireless networks and the wireless adapter is not detected in the Device Manager.

Professor Snugglesworth

It took about an hour, but I contacted HP, and they're sending a box to ship the laptop too, free of charge. Thanks for the heads up.

Only issue, though, is that she's concerned about the stickers she's got on her laptop (Jack Skellington. It's a bit of an obsession). She's afraid HP will have those stickers removed. I suggested leaving a note with the notebook, but I recall that incident with the autographed 360...

Rhakyr

with all the laptops I've sent to HP the only time I've seen stickers removed is if they replace any of the plastics during the repair.

1ddqd

Rhakyr wrote: »

with all the laptops I've sent to HP the only time I've seen stickers removed is if they replace any of the plastics during the repair.

I worked at Geek Squad for a year, but as with all things, ymmv - I've seen HP do some CRRAAAAZY things at service. The stickers won't matter, they won't care about it unless (as Rhakyr said) they replace panels on the notebook. If it's the wireless card, it's only going to be an internal slot-based wifi chip they can pull and replace (much the same as RAM).

Professor Snugglesworth

Frankly her laptop looks like crap with those stickers on, but whatever. The notebook was shipped today, although she's got plenty of fears. She doesn't trust that there internet. She had some issue with Olympus over losing her camera while shipping it back. Took almost a month before she got a replacement sent back.

1ddqd

Out of curiosity, did she have anything important backed up? HP is notorious for formatting partitions.

PeregrineFalcon

1ddqd wrote: »

Out of curiosity, did she have anything important backed up? HP is notorious for formatting partitions.

In this case you're probably safe - this specific issue gets a "replace hardware and test-in-place" directive at the repair depot.

Professor Snugglesworth

She made backups before shipping it out.

zanetheinsane

I have an HP Pavillion zt3200 that I had Windows installed on, and after a while it would routinely drop connection on the ethernet port (not the wireless). This made it impossible to stream video or download large files since the download would just drop halfway through.

I never figured out the problem before the hard drive on it died.

Professor Snugglesworth

Damn, that was fast. We sent the laptop out around Thursday, and it arrived today on Tuesday. The stickers are intact too.

Not a bad service. Maybe I'll consider HP if I ever get a laptop.

1ddqd

They aren't bad (when they work). In fact, they're very good value-for-money. The only problem is when the parts manufacturers take a crap on shipments (read: dv6000 series and RAM)