I am posting my review of my HP DV6 Quad Edition Laptop here as I am certain that HP will not allow it to be posted to their review area for this product and I feel that it may help others avoid my mistake…
Original Review
I pulled the trigger on getting this laptop when the 30% deal was like – just could not pass up the config for the price… I have previously owned HP products, with mixed results… I swore after my last one (dv6000t) required me to power it up via the expansion port 6 months into owning it that I would never buy another one, but I just couldn’t pass it up and really hoped that they had improved on the quality front… Unfortunately, this was not the case..
I received my laptop this past week and was initially impressed with it’s speed and ability to handle any game that I tossed at it… My happiness was short lived however – within a couple of days I began experiencing intermittent lockups (total freeze requiring a hard power cycle)…I researched the issues and found many in the HP forums experiencing the exact same off hangs (often when browsing the web in any browser)… To exclude anything that I installed, I performed a factory restore – first post-install boot and it hung on my first click of the Start button… Happened on each subsequent reboot… Decided another restore was in order -going for the minimal restore (with less bloatware) – no dice (still freezing)…Contact HP and the forum complaints were confirmed – they act as if this is the first that they have heard of it, recommend restore and then to send in for service 🙁 Fortunately, I am well within my 21 days to return for a full refund – which I did today… I am not going to waste any more time than I already have trying to make their product stable…I really wanted to like this laptop – felt like I got a great deal (something that the support reps all tried to stress to me)… Sorry… If I can’t use my laptop reliably, then I didn’t get a deal at all…When considering that I am 0 for 3 in regards to device quality with the 3 HP computers that I have purchased, I can say this time for certain that I will not be buying another HP computer. P.S. I am a computer programmer and tech with more than 15 years of ‘advanced computing’ experience – these are just bad/flaky units.
A quick Google of “DV6 Freeze Lockup” would have caused me enough concern to prevent this order – you live and you learn. Everything from the Wireless Network Card to the Touchpad driver to the Graphics driver are cited as the cause (possible as Safe Mode will run for hours without issue), but regardless of the cause, I am not going to spend days/weeks trying to resolve issues on a brand new PC – shouldn’t have to and am not going to risk going over my 21 day return window just to wind up with a lemon… Note: I am quite used to PC repair and have done so for more than a decade now, but I will be damned if I am going to pay them well over 1K so that I can waste time fixing their bugs… Guess it will be a Lenovo or ASUS next go – even if it costs a little more…