No bios update for dv6000
Beware, HP has turned to deception. I have bought thousands of dollars’ worth of HP products. I would recommend the purchase of HP in my official capacity as an engineering manager. However, I have been disappointed by performance and support in all cases. I have two machines where I could not write recover media. The latest is with my Pavilion dv6000 notebook. It has the restart issue that may be related to the NVidia GPU overheating problem. This problem is known and HP must have decided to let it go without caring about the goodwill of its customers.
The specifics for the latest incident are as follows:
Seeking support I called a number found on the HP site. I was charged for support from a HP partner from a foreign land only to make things worse.
When I call HP they say that they notebook is unsupported and is obsolete. So, why was I charged?
My pavilion would not restart. The symptom started 5 days ago doing a software update from Microsoft. The update restarted my system and the system hung. After a forced shutdown (depressing the power button for 5s), I got a software recovery screen. I did a recover and it restarted. It hung again. This time the recovery screen indicated I could not proceed and to contact support.
I tried to recover to the factory setting. This seemed to work until I did updates and the machine tried to restart. It hung again. I did HW diagnostics, but the diagnostics indicated no problems. The disk scan from Vista also found no problem.
Before I sought support I found that instead of restarting, if I did a shutdown, I could limp thought enough of the update to Windows 7. However, the issue remained and it appeared to be HW related. This is when I called HP support.
First, I told them (ITechLine) it was HW related and I did not need them to remote diagnose my machine. They insisted so I spent a day watching a tech do virus scans and disk scans. Later, they said that they had fix the problem, but the tech who was do the diagnostic admitted that the original issue seems to be HW related and remained.
How I got the ITechLine number from the HP website. The may have been my mistake and a better number could be found on the HP website. The waste of time may be, I believe, a deliberate obfuscation by HP.
Later I called enough people at HP (still in a foreign land) to find the HP had decided to abandon support for my notebook and I could not get a support or parts from them for this machine. The person indicated that the technology was obsolete. This was also obfuscation; since a SATA drive for this my machine could be found for under $50 and would have more than twice the capacity. In fact, I could purchase a new 2G memory SODIMM, a new hard drive, and a new battery for less than $90. The support line charged $149.
I did some research on the web to find that the NVidia GPU overheating issue was likely the cause. So, I disassembled the notebook to clean the fan cooling system. The issue of restarting was dramatically lessened. I can restart 5 out of 6 times, which leads me to believe that it is the GPU overheat problem.
However, now I can’t use the optical drive to boot the Windows 7 media. It doesn’t show in my computer. I also can’t write recovery media using the internal optical drive. I suspected that it is the bios, since one of the steps I found on the web was to reset the cmos to the original. I see that it is not the latest. Going to the HP site for the bios update, I find that they no longer have the update and my machine does not get detected by their auto detect process. The have forgotten that they made the notebook.
Therefore, I have a shiny almost new looking notebook that can't run and is unsupported. It is obsolete even though the state of the industry has not really progressed for notebooks. It was Wi-Fi enabled with a great screen and could run all of the latest SW until 5 days ago. It is too light to be a good doorstop, so it is useless. All I can get from HP is denial, deception and a runaround (in a foreign accent).
Being an EE, I thought HP test equipment was great and that HP would be capable and honorable. It is the end of an era.
Does anyone know where I can get the bios update for free? It is not worth spending good money after bad to pay for a bios update service.