HP coughs up $6.5m to make dodgy laptop display lawsuit go away HP has settled a class-action lawsuit in the US over the failing screens in some of its Pavillion notebooks. Judge Thomas Kuhnle of the Santa Clara County Superior Court in California gave final approval on Friday to the settlement deal that will see the PC vendor hand over $6.5m to customers who, back in 2002, purchased one …
The bottom 2-3 inches of the HP laptop (start bar) used to flicker. Happened just outside warranty and was estimated to cost 50% of the original laptop cost to fix. Fuck that HP... For that matter, Fuck Asus ROG too, and their rebooting overheating laptops 2 of which I have now. And Fuck Dell too, for over-selling that POS called Vista. Lastly... Fuck Lenovo for Superfish etc. Anyway, my next purchase will be an MSI or an Acer. Hoping for better luck!
On the subject of lemons, the worst laptop I ever had was a Powerbook. One day I came home to find it in the driveway, my wife had thrown it there hoping I'd run over it so I couldn't fix it again.
So there's my Apple story. Not to worry, I have plenty of others - my wife is great at destroying electronics from any manufacturer.
Acer: my first laptop was an Acer. The screen failed just outside the warranty and was replaced at no cost by them. It finally died after seven or eight years (at an inconvenient time) I think the mainboard had a crack (intermittent errors that could not be attributed to anything really). Oh, and I had problems with power management under Linux the first year, but that settled after a while.
My Samsung netbook developed intermittent screen failures after six years of continuous, daily (ab-)use on the train, plane, at conferences, bounced around in a full backpack etc. basically not how you should treat delicate electronics. I should open it and check the cables or connectors, they might be loose.
Why is it that cheap laptops practically last next to forever, but the more expensive ones b0rk themselves just out of warranty?
Had a Gigabyte W565M laptop with Vista preinstalled - rock solid, surprisingly. Upgraded to Windows7, and it was even better. When the infamous Win10 upgrade trojan rolled around for a call, I blocked it with Never10 as I was happy with Win7.
Still is chugging along, a bit of a slowpoke in comparision to others, but what the hey, it still works, and doesn't have funky issues. Kids play their games on it, so it is still good for something. :)
Easily fixed. Revise your consumer protection legislation to remove any fixed time period to limit the warranty and ensure that protection lasts for "the reasonable life of the product".
Of course, this then raises the question of what is the "reasonable life" of a given thing, but in practice this is easily assessed on a case by case basis.
This is how it works here in NZ. And "work" it absolutely does. Any time a retailer or manufacturer tries to play hardball claiming that something is out of warranty, just mention "Consumer Guarantees Act" (CGA) and they soon start acting reasonably.
Even Apple.
An important aspect of the CGA is that any explicit warranty terms that attempt to limit a warranty by "trumping" or overriding your rights under the CGA are unenforceable and void.
So, for example: Apple tried to tell me that they would not replace the keyboard cover for my iPad Pro despite being only 2 weeks old because their terms and conditions state that replacements will only be provided for faults within 10 days (!!!) of purchase. Quite apart from the ludicrous nature of this, the fact was that my keyboard was delivered two weeks before the iPad itself so I had literally no chance to identify the defect within their ridiculously limited window.
But rather than having to argue that, I simply referred the Apple drone to the "reasonable"-ness clause in the NZ CGA and the fact that their T's and C's simply did not apply.
Other companies are far more reasonable from the get go: A Logitech Harmony remote (one of the older ones) stopped working after 3 years. The springs on the recharging dimples on the base unit wore out so that the remote would not couple and re-charge on the base. After a year of getting by with foil pads to bridge the gap, this too eventually stopped working.
I contacted Logitech who sent me brand new replacement remote and base unit - without a quibble. I didn't even have to pay postage.
More directly related to this thread, an HP NetBook we bought for my daughter turned out to be a lemon. At 18 and 24 and 36 months it suffered various faults necessitating replacement of variously the keyboard, screen and mainboard (sometimes combinations of 2 or all 3). To be fair to HP, they never argued about fixing the fault but after the last time getting it fixed we flicked it on on Trade Me (local equiv of ebay).
Note: The person that bought it from us was still protected since the CGA applies to the manufacturer, not the retailer. So if that NetBook continued to suffer faults HP would still have been required to step-up and fix it. We were just fed up of having to deal with that.
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