HP, stop making bad laptops!
Im writing this on my 3rd HP laptop in 2 years. This is a company owned laptop, because if not, I would never have purchased another laptop from Hewlett Packard.
My first HP laptop was a so called NC8430, which is in their line of business laptops. It replaced a T20/T21 (I have forgotten), which was 3+ years old, and still working fine. The NC8430 has a 15″ display, 256mb graphics card, comes with 1 gig of ram (which I had upgraded to 2gig right away), and as far as i remember, a 60 or 80 gb harddrive. It also had a 2.0 ghz Core 2 duo processor from Intel. Pretty nice machine from reading just the specs. And thats where the story takes a turn for the worse.
A week after I received my first NC8430 the display started cutting out on it, sometimes it would turn on, sometimes it wouldnt. At first i thought it was a bad connection somewhere, because right from the beginning the hinges that holds the lid in place felt kind of wobly as well. Anyways, after speaking to the company that sold it to me (company), and since it had not even been 14 days since the purchase, they sent out a guy to fix it. Turned out it was a bad graphics card, and it was replaced.
After a while, the wobbling lid became really bad, but (un)fortunally the machine got hit by a snow storm (real snow comming through the roof, and landing on it, so I declared it dead. I dont blame HP for that though 🙂
I was told to order another NC8430, which I did. After a month of usage, this machine started running really hot, showing the same problems with the lid as the previous one. I shrugged it off for a while, but about 2-3 months ago, it became too much. According to Coretemp, each core was running at 99 degrees (celcius), and the exhaust fans was soo hot I couldnt have my hand anywhere near it. The USB port on the side, which has a metal frame, became so hot I actually burned my finger when I accidently touched it. I finally got enough of my left hand being very uncomfortably warm just by resting my hand on it, that I convinced my boss of purchasing another laptop for me. This time I got a 8510p, which I guess is the successor of the NC8430.
It has an even worse keyboard layout, the speakers are in the wrong place (almost underneath which makes audio the inverse.. inaudible at best). The keyboard is of really poor quality, and sometimes its like you get a finger under a key and almost rips it off.
Also, for some reason, during class today, the “touch” button for the wireless activity didnt work, and there is NO way to software-enable it, so I was left without wireless internet until I finally managed to tap it hard and brutally enough to turn back on.
At the moment, im in my hotel room, just feeling lucky that wireless is still working.
HP = Bad Software and Bad Laptop Hardware.
If you want a laptop that is usable and will last for a while, dont buy HP, its that simple. Sorry, but its true.