BEWARE! Compaq's underhanded battery recall.
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml06/06007.html
On October 14, 2005, HP/Compaq issued a recall (user is responsible to contact HP/Compaq for info/replacement) for 135,000 notebook batteries, located in machines manufactured between March 2004 and September 2004. There have been reported instances, in which the faulty batteries have caught on fire, overheated and/or shorted out. There have ALSO been instances, where as a result of the defective batteries, that additional damage has resulted to other components within the notebook unit.
I draw your attention to the dates here.
1- Start Date of Manufacture: March 2004
2- End Date of Manufacture: September 2004
3- Date of recall announcement: October 2005
4- Length of HP/Compaq Warranty: 12 months
HP/Compaq issued a recall for a defective product, after the warranty for 100% of the affected units had expired. HP/Compaq offers to kindly replace your defective battery, but to assess/fix damages CAUSED by said defective battery, to the other components in your laptop you must pay for HP Customer Support, since your unit is out of warranty. This is underhanded, cheap, and stinks of being completely sleazy.
I could understand, if I was trying to get a repair out of warranty, because i dropped the laptop, or got it wet. I am simply attempting to get my laptop fixed, due to a problem that was caused by a defective product, that HP/Compaq admits is defective and can cause further problems, that I was not even made AWARE of until AFTER my warranty had expired.
My problem is this: On Saturday, Jan. 7th, 2006 - the battery in my R3000 laptop shorted and died. That same day, my laptop crashed and would not even POST. So I reinstalled Windows, losing all my data in the meantime. (I had most of it backed up.. not all of it.) Even after a reinstall, the PC took 10 minutes to boot, and then within 5 minutes of booting, would crash with some form of a BSOD, relating to explorer.exe, or kernel errors. So I ran Hirem's Boot CD, and everything related to the hard drive failed. So I replaced the hard drive with a spare. Same thing. So, my deduction is, the battery fried, and took the IDE Controller, and possibly more on my motherboard with it.
Now, I work for a large, multi-million dollar Engineering/Architectural Firm on the east coast. I have purchasing power for all software and hardware purchases for the New Jersey branch of my company. After this personal experience with HP/Compaq, I will not be able to do business with them in the professional realm, if this is how they are going to demonstrate they deal with consumer relations. That being said, I have recommended HP/Compaq products before. We have a ProLiant Server, we have large format HP printers/plotters, we have several older Compaq business computers. And when the time comes to upgrade, which it is approaching something during 2006, I will not be replacing any of these devices with HP/Compaq products.
So, here lies the last words, of a dying Compaq fan...
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml06/06007.html
On October 14, 2005, HP/Compaq issued a recall (user is responsible to contact HP/Compaq for info/replacement) for 135,000 notebook batteries, located in machines manufactured between March 2004 and September 2004. There have been reported instances, in which the faulty batteries have caught on fire, overheated and/or shorted out. There have ALSO been instances, where as a result of the defective batteries, that additional damage has resulted to other components within the notebook unit.
I draw your attention to the dates here.
1- Start Date of Manufacture: March 2004
2- End Date of Manufacture: September 2004
3- Date of recall announcement: October 2005
4- Length of HP/Compaq Warranty: 12 months
HP/Compaq issued a recall for a defective product, after the warranty for 100% of the affected units had expired. HP/Compaq offers to kindly replace your defective battery, but to assess/fix damages CAUSED by said defective battery, to the other components in your laptop you must pay for HP Customer Support, since your unit is out of warranty. This is underhanded, cheap, and stinks of being completely sleazy.
I could understand, if I was trying to get a repair out of warranty, because i dropped the laptop, or got it wet. I am simply attempting to get my laptop fixed, due to a problem that was caused by a defective product, that HP/Compaq admits is defective and can cause further problems, that I was not even made AWARE of until AFTER my warranty had expired.
My problem is this: On Saturday, Jan. 7th, 2006 - the battery in my R3000 laptop shorted and died. That same day, my laptop crashed and would not even POST. So I reinstalled Windows, losing all my data in the meantime. (I had most of it backed up.. not all of it.) Even after a reinstall, the PC took 10 minutes to boot, and then within 5 minutes of booting, would crash with some form of a BSOD, relating to explorer.exe, or kernel errors. So I ran Hirem's Boot CD, and everything related to the hard drive failed. So I replaced the hard drive with a spare. Same thing. So, my deduction is, the battery fried, and took the IDE Controller, and possibly more on my motherboard with it.
Now, I work for a large, multi-million dollar Engineering/Architectural Firm on the east coast. I have purchasing power for all software and hardware purchases for the New Jersey branch of my company. After this personal experience with HP/Compaq, I will not be able to do business with them in the professional realm, if this is how they are going to demonstrate they deal with consumer relations. That being said, I have recommended HP/Compaq products before. We have a ProLiant Server, we have large format HP printers/plotters, we have several older Compaq business computers. And when the time comes to upgrade, which it is approaching something during 2006, I will not be replacing any of these devices with HP/Compaq products.
So, here lies the last words, of a dying Compaq fan...