Law Student writes in with an objection to HP’s repair service, which twice sent back his laptop even more broken than it was when he sent it in. Now HP wants another crack at the machine but he’s leery of giving the company another shot.

He writes:

I’m currently a law student in Houston and I bought the brand new HP DV6t core i7 laptop primarily for school purposes (but powerful enough to do other stuff too). The problems actually began during one of my final exams, when the USB port where i had my mouse plugged in actually shorted out, causing a massive spark. I decided to send my laptop in for repairs, since both USB ports had stopped working.

I also took this opportunity to have them fix the Blu-ray player that came with the laptop, what with it not working at all since I opened the box. As per your advice, instead of contacting the main repair line, I sent a message to the executive himself. A day later, I got a call from an executive response associate who took excellent care of me and promptly sent me a box to ship them my laptop for repairs.

About a week and a half later, I got the laptop back. HP had fixed all the problems I had asked them to look at, but they must have done something to it while they had it, because it had a host of new problems afterward. First, in their infinite wisdom, they completely reformatted my laptop, even though i had only sent it in for hardware repairs. Second, the wireless refused to work (i later fixed this after spending hours on several internet blogs after HP contacting HP was no help). Third, and perhaps most importantly, the laptop now randomly freezes for no discernible reason.

Be it browsing, typing an email, taking notes in class, and even during two different exams this last semester, the laptop has frozen up or randomly rebooted. Thus far, I have sent it in twice to get this problem fixed (both times going directly through executive support), but they keep telling me nothing is wrong. The thing is, the freezing/locking up has started happening more and more often.

As of now, I can get somewhere between 10 – 30 minutes of use from it before it freezes. I have repeatedly asked them to replace the laptop, even if they give me something cheaper (I spent $1,200 on this one), but the only thing they want to do is for me to send it in again. Having done this twice already to no avail, I’m at my wit’s end and now stuck with a $1,200 brick. What do i do?

If you’ve gone through laptop repair hell and have some advice for Law Student, submit your testimony.

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