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HP Recall on 900,000 Notebooks
phycoman writes "900,000 HP and Compaq laptops have potential memory issues and are being recalled. The RAM chips from four manufacturers can possibly lead to system corruption and lockups. The affected notebooks are Compaq Evo Notebook N610c, Compaq Evo Notebook N610v, Compaq Evo Notebook N620c, Compaq Evo Notebook N800c, Compaq Evo Notebook N800v, Compaq Evo Notebook N800w, Compaq Evo Notebook N1000c, Compaq Evo Notebook N1000v, Compaq Presario 1500, Compaq Presario 2800, Compaq Presario x1000, Compaq Presario x1200, HP Compaq Business Notebook nx7000 and
HP Pavilion zt3000. As a result, HP has created a website whick allows users to download a program to test for faulty RAM chips."
Hard to believe that the memory makers who hold 70% of the world market fail to produce their stuff to specs.
Looks more like a flaw with the Intel chipsets in those notebooks, but that would be much more expensive to replace.
If you're affected, check whether the new RAM modules aren't slower than the ones you're replacing.
> I guess all companies can screw up!
But when Apple screwed up with the iBook lots of Apple fans declared how great it was that Apple cares so much about the quality of their products to repair them out of warantee, and that other manufacturers would never do this.
I imagine this only applies to the opening the casing, most laptops have a removeable panel to access the memory.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The problem may not be the memory chips per-se but the configuation information. Modern memory modules have a small non-volatile serial configuration memory that tells the BIOS which CAS/RAS/Tpd/Trd/etc settings to use. If any of these settings are wrong you are likely to get memory corruption. I'd wager this is more likely to be the problem.
I can't believe this, a company is proactive in issuing a product recall and all you can do is think about all your bad experiences that you've had in the past? It seems to me like the problems you list are not uncommon across almost every company selling tech products across the industry. In any case, your post is quite irrelevant, because it appears that the problem regarding the memory is an industry-wide problem, not an HP-specific one.
I take it as a good thing that HP is first to recall such a large volume of shipped products, whereas look what their main competitors in the laptop segment are up to - Dell is still "evaluating" and I've no idea what IBM is up to.
It's a shame that the recall isn't issued by the memory/chipset manufacturers themselves, since they are primarily responsible for the flaw, even though laptop vendors in general are also somewhat responsible for letting the flaw go unnoticed for so long.
HP doesn't have a perfect track record, but give credit where credit is due. A company that issues a comprehensive product recall, despite it being an "industry-wide problem" and despite it probably being something relatively minor/obscure (which is why it escaped detection for so long), is one that to me cares more for their products than what you've described above.
I myself am primarily a Dell customer (which isn't saying much), but I give HP the edge in being more proactive in this particular case. For all you know, they could have just shrugged their shoulders and pointed fingers at the memory/chipset manufacturers.
Regarding monetary losses, I'm sure there is some sort of sharing of cost-of-replacement between the various companies responsible for this product recall.
So you take your original HP 128 Meg sodimm card, mail it back to them, get a new one, and a 32Mbyte USB flash memory key with an HP logo on it for the cost of postage.
A really greedy cheap bastard would have sold it as soon as the card was out of the box
Just like the real player thing*, it seems that Linux users get the better deal on drivers and crapware.
HP Linux drivers (for the printers at least, I havent used the camera ones) are solid, HP backed, support things like the card readers and have no crapware attached.
There seem to be quite a few cases where Linux drivers and software are actually _better_ than the Windows versions.
*Real player for UNIX is a pretty decent piece of software.
Beep beep.
I remember when HP used to represent quaility too. HP oscilliscopes, spectrum analyzers, calculators were sought after. There is old HP equipment still in use around here from 20+ years ago that still works great; pieces of equipment that have never had parts break.
Of recent products: I have an HP48GX calc that is working beautifully. I have a cheapo deskjet printer that works OK; the ink prices are murder and a third party cartridge seems to have plugged some the heads causing streaks. It's still much better than the Epson color stylus 2 I had before. I also have a ZT1000 notebook computer, about 2 years old. I've had a few issues, but overall it is very stable.
I agree that their quaility has gone down a great deal recently (with Carly+merger mostly).
About companies that don't care about long-term reputation, only short-term profits: I worry that it is going that way too. Still, the implicit purpose of most corps is to make money for the investors.
Whenever I buy a new computer or new memory, I always run it through a memory tester I boot from a CD. It's good to run one of these for at least 24 hours. If you find any memory problems, you might want to return the product.
It's also fun to benchmark it after the tests are done. I used SiSoftware Sandra BenchmarkHQ.
One thing to look out for though is BIOS programs that load into memory addresses that will effect the test. I kept getting errors until I disabled my onboard IDE RAID controller, and then the memory checked out fine. I guess the controller was loading something into the memory and the test would read it back after the controller changed it.
Ah, you ought to live in the UK. Here everything has to come with at least a one year manufacturer's warranty (they CAN'T get out of that) and after that the shop is responsible for the product for a further 5 years. I didn't know about the 5 years bit till I read the Trading Standards website.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
Yeah and people have to send the RAM in first. Many people cannot afford to be without their laptops while they wait for HP to process their returned RAM. Depending on which model laptop, the laptop might still boot with the onboard RAM, but with Windows XP the laptop is useless until the new RAM arrives.
The time has come for us to bill the companies for all the time we put into supporting their customers for problems that are caused by faulty products. I'll bet almost every Slashdotter is supporting at least one person, people who are Microsoft, Compaq, Dell, or Sony customers, people like my 78 year-old aunt or my 72 year-old neighbour. Are people like this really going to use a wee screwdriver to replace a memory module?
I just this minute received another call.
What is our time worth? How much responsibility does business have? It has been almost two years since my son was issued his Compaq Evo N1000c by his uni. I can't believe that it took Compaq all this time to discover the problem. There's more to this than meets the eye. All along, my son has been complaining about the computers, saying how 'crappy' they were, how often he and the other students would get the BSOD and other errors and problems.
Oh Gawd! Just thought of it.... I'd better ring my lawyer. She's got a Compaq too. And its always been unstable. I don't support her PCs; no one does. I always attributed her problems to bloody Windows ME. Now I wonder.
Well on the bright side, at times like these, relatives are forced to admit that a geeky girl who would rather mess about with computers than shop for clothes isn't a complete lost cause.
Julia Cameron
Oich ù agus hiùraibh éile