Lawsuit claims HP PCs suffer constant lockups, crashes

Lawsuit claims HP PCs suffer constant lockups, crashes

Seeks class-action status, charges HP with selling 'inherently defective' quad-core PCs

By Gregg Keizer
November 16, 2009 03:29 PM ET

Computerworld - A Colorado man has sued Hewlett-Packard, saying that its Pavilion Elite desktop computers are "inherently defective," and constantly lock up within 10-20 minutes of use.

The lawsuit, which was filed with a California federal court last Thursday, seeks class-action status that, if granted, would open the case to all HP customers who have purchased one of the allegedly defective PCs.

According to the lawsuit, HP's Pavilion Elite e9150t, e9180f, e9180t, m9600t and m9650f, when equipped with the "Truckee" motherboard from Pegatron Technology and Intel's i7 quad-core processor, crash or lock up soon after they're powered on.
Pegatron Technology is a subsidiary of Taiwan-based Asustek Computer, which is best known for its ASUS line of netbooks.

More at: Lawsuit claims HP PCs suffer constant lockups, crashes

Glad I'm looking into a Phenom II X4 for the next build here only with an MSI or Gigabyte board to boot! Intel and Asus seem to be taking a nose dive there!

Good luck.

I am pulling for him. Customer service like that is inexcusable.

~Lordbob

You could always go to another company like Dell and have problems there too since their support often gets a bad rep! On one machine alone you could simply see that repaired or replaced under warranty. But when several in the different model catagories are having problems it shows HP slipped up somewhere along the line and could well leave many with headache systems.

That's called choosing which OS will be on the system you order direct through them. They choose the model and hardwares when you select the OS!

Night Hawk said:

when equipped with the "Truckee" motherboard .

Glad I'm looking into a Phenom II X4 for the next build

I'd say it's more of a motherboard issue than an intel one.

Whatever or whichever it turns out to be it sounds too much like a temp problems of some type. An inadequate hsf for a stock cooled system will cause cpu problems while the cpus being replaced still saw freeze ups!

The drawback too often seen with prebuilds however is the wimply supplies used while this could well be the memory used. Mismatched or defective memory in large batches would effect numerous people.

There's undoubtedly some quality issues with these machines. If it were an i7 range problem, the complaints would be universal.

Others on the thread said that although HP had replaced either the CPU or the entire computer, they were still seeing frequent crashes or lock-ups of the Pavilion

Without seeing the crash dumps etc, it's impossible to say what the true cause is.

I still think the only solid part of those builds is the CPU - unless they are installed incompetently :)

It also depends on how they were assembled as well. If there's a serious lack of QC you could end up seeing numerous problems from the start. The title and case simply points to "defecive pcs" without any specifics being pointed out except mentioning quad cores were used as well as some Asus model boards. But Asus boards have been in the Pavillion series all along.

Whatever the cause is, they'd want to pull their finger out and sort it. People buy those pre-built machines and expect them to work. I know I would.