Laptop "repair"?!

[Cozzer]

Dropped my wife's HP pavilion laptop into our local repair shop about 3 weeks ago, wondering if the fan was dirty and/or worn out.
Few days later we were told that it wasn't the fan, but it was the HDD. We OK'd a new one, and then heard zilch until we chased them. They were concerned about the battery....it was "dangerous", so we agreed they fit a new 'un.
Silence again, until we chased them.
"The hinges are broken"....another £70 to replace.
They broke them.
Ah...HP hinges are notoriously bad at braking...well-known for it....
Surely if that was already known, maybe some extra care was called for?!

Just picked it up....or I should say "them" up, as the machine's in 3 bits.
£225.

I'm not going to name the outfit involved, but if you live around the Sheffield/NE Derbyshire region and are likely to find this bunch of cowboys online, let me know and I'll tell you....

 

[Spectric]

When you buy a new one make sure it has an SSD drive, they are far more robust because they have no mechanical / moving parts. Apart from that I think they are all much cheaper built, my old HP is twice the weight of my Asus and has a robust frame whereas the Asus being lighter is supposedly a selling point.

 

[Fitzroy]

Had the hinge replaced on my son's laptop, 2weeks after on opening the screen failed, on closer inspection I think they damaged something whilst repairing the hinge. Normally I do these things myself but was stretched for time so gave it to the 'professionals', never again! £100+ to 'fix' it and a new laptop to boot.

 

[ajs]

Had the hinge replaced on my son's laptop, 2weeks after on opening the screen failed, on closer inspection I think they damaged something whilst repairing the hinge. Normally I do these things myself but was stretched for time so gave it to the 'professionals', never again! £100+ to 'fix' it and a new laptop to boot.

To be fair the display connection is always a weak point on clamshell laptops they're typically a "flexi", essentially a circuit board printed on something resembling an OHP sheet. They inevitably get brittle with age. They can start to fail but live on in general use, but fail catastrophically when the machine is opened up.

Sometimes they're a separate assembly which is potentially replaceable, but official laptop spares are generally only in professional distribution channels. Sometimes they're integrated with the display making repair uneconomic.

Personally if my own laptop has any issues I'll take a crack at sorting it if out of warranty. I refuse to touch anyone else's as a favour, it doesn't matter how many health warnings you give, it's always "your" fault if it ends up worse than it started.

 

[Cozzer]

Well, to be equally fair, they broke it and expected me to pay for it! If they were aware of supposed weaknesses, they shouldn't have accepted the bloody job!
I've found out tonight that they haven't fixed the touch pad either, and to cap it all, when I powered it up, i got the message saying "No battery connected"!

Guess where I'm going early on Monday!!

 

[okeydokey]

When you buy your next laptop please make sure it has a SSD drive they're electronic - silent - and much faster than old style hard drives. The difference in boot up time is remarkable.
I bought a HP a couple of years ago and a short while later had a SSD drive for a present, my local laptop shop mirrored the new drive to the one in the machine and swapped them over - wow boot up speed and other stuff much improved

 

[MorrisWoodman12]

Before going back I'd Google HP hinges to see if anyone else thinks they're weak and prone to breaking - that is if you have a working computer on which to do so.

 

[Cozzer]

When you buy your next laptop please make sure it has a SSD drive they're electronic - silent - and much faster than old style hard drives. The difference in boot up time is remarkable.
I bought a HP a couple of years ago and a short while later had a SSD drive for a present, my local laptop shop mirrored the new drive to the one in the machine and swapped them over - wow boot up speed and other stuff much improved

Yes, it already had an SSD.
It failed, and now it has a new one.

However, what it hasn't got is the new battery which we paid for.

Visiting the shop tomorrow to argue this out, probably before contacting the local Trading Standards outfit....

 

[ajs]

Well, to be equally fair, they broke it and expected me to pay for it! If they were aware of supposed weaknesses, they shouldn't have accepted the bloody job!
I've found out tonight that they haven't fixed the touch pad either, and to cap it all, when I powered it up, i got the message saying "No battery connected"!

Guess where I'm going early on Monday!!

I understand that I'm not defeding the outfit, but breaking the screen connector is always a risk of the job. They're on the hook for it thoguh unless they agree otherwise in advance.

 

[--Tom--]

Just remember to back up SSD drives if you have anything you want to keep on them, when they fail data recovery is really tough.

 

[xmetal]

HP laptops are the worst for breaking in one way or another. With the hinges, it's normally the plastic hinge mountings that contain the threaded inserts breaking away from the board. That is usually part of the lower case. It's pretty normal for these to be on the way out when opening HP laptops.

In the original posters case, I wouldn't have proceeded further with the repair without getting permission from the customer for the extra work required in that situation.

 

[Agent_zed]

Just remember to back up SSD drives if you have anything you want to keep on them, when they fail data recovery is really tough.

yeah normal HDDs tend to fail over time and give a bit of warning. SSDs just stop working.

 

[Spectric]

SSD drives although more mechanically robust than traditional drives do tend to have a shorter lifespan. In a laptop it is worth the tradeoff providing you keep a backup of important data but on a desktop I use an SSD drive for the OS and programs because they are fast whilst retaining larger traditional drives for all my data, large SSD drives are a lot more expensive. I have always been told it is the read / write cycles that take there toll on SSD drives but things may be improving as technology advances.

 

[Cozzer]

Finally got around to having a proper look at the HP yesterday : we lost our beloved Labrador at the beginning of the week, so what with vet visits and the eventual end, it's been a very emotional and busy time.
It turns out that not only have we a laptop in three bits, all the connecting case and internal bolts/screws haven't been returned either, some of which help hold the battery in place. The new battery doesn't align with the connecting necessary pins, so the machine doesn't think it has one.
Unfortunately, the shop in question doesn't open at all on Saturdays, so I'm having to curb my annoyance until Monday's visit.

 

[MorrisWoodman12]

They sound like a load of clowns who think they can get away with it because their customers know no better. Good luck with them.

 

[worn thumbs]

Seems you have been dealing with a cowboy outfit.As for Monday,it is a bank holiday so maybe call before leaving home.

 

[Cozzer]

Seems you have been dealing with a cowboy outfit.As for Monday,it is a bank holiday so maybe call before leaving home.

Yep - you're right. August bank job. What with our Lab an' all that, it'd completely slipped my mind. Considering they don't even open on Saturdays - and close for an lunch hour during weekdays! - there's no way they'll be open on Monday.
Tuesday it is....

 

[throbscottle]

Interested to know how this turned out?

@Spectric - traditional hard drives are specified with MTBF " mean time between failures" which they can exceed by years, albeit with errors, and supplied with a 1 year warranty. SSDs are specified as having a fixed number of read/write cycles they will survive before failure, and they really don't last long after that.. Funniest thing I've seen is one of our customers uses RAID in all their PCs and upgraded their estate to all SSDs. Not very long before they started failing, with both drives going at the same time. Lots of extra work. Silly sods.

 

[Spectric]

I only use an SSD for my OS and programs so not heavy writing cycles, all my work files are on ordinary mechanical drives that are mirrored and backed up. Also large capacity mechanical drives are a lot cheaper than SSD's.

 

[nickds1]

There's SSDs and then there's SSDs...

Without going too technical, it's the WRITE cycles that wear out SSD cells. The internal SSD controller will do something called "wear levelling" (WL).

The memory in the SSD will be of two main types: some expensive cells that will take a huge number of writes, plus an awful lot of cheaper cells (the majority) which are good for lots of reads but not so many writes. There are also two other blocks of memory: the failed list where bad chunks of memory are put, plus the replacement list which holds spare blocks to swap in if an in-use chunk fails...

WL regularly rotates blocks that are heavily read rather than written with cheap blocks that are less used (counts are maintained of how many times each block is read or written).
Blocks that are heavily written are replaced with expensive blocks that can handle the number of write cycles...
Blocks that fail ECC are placed onto the bad list and replaced with an appropriate type block from the spare list.

All this happens inside the SSD at full data rate and is transparent to the user.

Cheap SSDs have fewer of the expensive cells and more of the cheaper cells, plus less spare cells.

Expensive SSDs have many more expensive cells, especially in their caches, and fewer cheap cells. The cells in expensive SSDs also tend to be a lot faster and the spare list is also bigger.

So, with SSDs, you generally get what you pay for.

You need to understand your use case and select the SSDs accordingly...

Remember: "Cheap, Fast, Reliable" - pick any two !!