HP DV9000 – A Possible Lemon?

Posted on: October 13th, 2009

This morning I had the 4th HP DV9000 laptop in my shop with a hardware failure. This is within about 2 months!

So far this is the highest incidence of hardware failure in a single computer model that I’ve seen.

Here’s how this laptop looks:

Sleek looking. And it works nice until it crashes (usually some time after the warranty expires).

We have attempted fixing two of these failed laptops by replacing motherboards in them. Unfortunately without success. They might be fixable but I’d not actually recommend it in this case. I figure from the high number of failures that it must have some low quality parts inside. So replacing one might fix it temporarily until another breaks.

So if you have this particular laptop model, or another DV series laptop then here’s some things you can do:

If your computer is still under warranty, extend your warranty (some discussions on the internet indicate that the problems are caused by the heat management of the computer & that causes a gradual degradation, not a sudden one). The problems seem to happen after about 2 years of use.
If can’t do that then I would recommend frequently saving your important information off of it and prepare to get another laptop when the DV9000 dies.

Hopefully, I won’t be seeing too much of these laptops in the future.