Need Advice... got sold a lemon...

Ashton

2[H]4U
Joined
Nov 13, 2004
Messages
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So, A guy on here was selling a laptop. It wasn't much of a deal, about average price based on eBay listings, but he was willing to trade. He had impressive heat with no negatives and had been a member for some time, so we worked out a cash+trade.

I got the laptop and everything seemed fine. It was working perfectly the first day save a crash or two (which were both in one program and seemed to stop when I uninstalled it), so I left him positive heat.

Second day as I started using it more intensely, it started crashing again, completely randomly... and the crashes got worse and worse. I thought it was an issue with the OS so I reinstalled. Didn't help. So I tried wiping the HDD and reinstalling. Now the crashes are so bad that I cant even install the OS.

I finally went online and started doing research and found out that this particular laptop suffered from a manufacturing defect (known for four years now), and basically my only option was to replace the motherboard, which would cost me more than I paid for the laptop...

Now's where things get fishy... seller had urged me to leave heat as soon as I got the laptop - which I did. Two weeks later and he's still not left me any despite a PM and a request on heatware - basically holding it hostage because while my heat's 100% positive, it's very low and a single negative will kill me...

My guess from all of this is that the seller knew the laptop was about to die and sold it and is withholding heat so I cant complain or request a refund. (Seller also did not include the exact model number of the laptop - which makes it harder to find the issue since the other models did not have the defect)

So I'm left with a dead laptop and no $$$. At this point I'd even just take a cash refund and chalk up the lost trade items to bad luck...

Anyone have suggestions? or am I boned?
 
I'm guessing this is one of those HP laptops with the nVIDIA chipset issue? My local tech shop fixes that with a reflow technique -- it's a 'band-aid' fix but it puts off the purchase of a new board by six months or so. The owner of that shop -- a very good friend of mine -- tells me that the only chipsets that don't survive his reflows, are the ones that were already irredeemably dead.

Here's the website for his shop --> http://nctritech.com/
...and a page on that site which you might find more useful --> http://nctritech.com/ship_in_repair.php

Hope that's helpful...

BTW -- in my opinion, your seller should at least cover the costs of whatever repair costs you wind up paying. Also -- I'd appreciate knowing who this seller is. I think I want to avoid him.
 
I would suggest changing the hard drive if you have an extra one laying around. It could just be the hard drive it self that might have gotten damaged during shipment. Trust me if its a bad hard drive it would have the symptoms you are describing.
 
I would suggest changing the hard drive if you have an extra one laying around. It could just be the hard drive it self that might have gotten damaged during shipment. Trust me if its a bad hard drive it would have the symptoms you are describing.

I may have found the problem actually - I posted on the official support forums and was told RAM was an issue, on a whim I swapped out the ram a THIRD time, and so far only 1 crash (which was while running JAVA which isn't officially supported anymore) I may have just had really bad luck and got bad ram TWICE... Jury's still out though since it was working fine when I got it - could still be the GPU and it got set *perfectly* in place to work... will report back whether it starts crashing constantly again or not...

Though I still find it very suspicious that the "perfectly fine" laptop was crashing with the ram it presumably had been running a while and the fact the guy hasn't left me any feedback...
 
I would run a test on all the hardware memtest 86, do a HDD check pulling the smart data, GPU test using heaven or other one. I do this for all new equipment to verify it works.
 
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