One year and two months ago I became the proud owner of a HP NC6120 notebook. Soon I repartioned it to make space for a dual boot Windows XP and Debian GNU/Linux system. Everything was fine. I could do anything within Windows and most of the hardware worken in debian after I started using testing. But, last week while working in the console some strange messages started to show up:
kernel: hub 5-0:1.0: over-current change on port 2 kernel: hub 1-0:1.0: over-current change on port 2
At first I thought it was a problem in the USB driver in my kernel because I did just reboot into a new kernel. When I got to work next day and used Windows I got:
Power Surge on Hub Port
These very annoying ‘help-balloons’ started showing up as fast as I could close them. At that time it was extremely warm in the Netherlands so I blamed that. Later that day I was in Telecity (amsterdam) to connect a server. I needed some some development tools so I started using my laptop in there. Then it struck me that I still got those error messages even when I was in a very good airconditioned environment. The next day I called HP customer support. I explained the guy answering my call the problem I had. After doing some stuff with him he told me he had never seen this problem before. A quick google on ‘NC6120 usb power surge’ learned that there was a thread at the HP forums about this. After searching the forums some more I found multiple threads about this problem. I confronted the customer support guy with this, but he told me that my laptop was out of warranty by 2 months and that it would cost me 660,- euro’s to fix this problem. I was a bit astonished with this outcome because while reading the forums it seemed to me like a production fault with this type of laptops. And if it’s a production fault it doesn’t matter if it’s in or out of warranty. Or they could at least make an arrangement. The customer support guy told me to email customer relations. I emailed customer relations with my case number and the URL’s to the threads attached. After 2 days of silence I got a reply saying that they denied my request to make an arrangement. As a producer of hardware they are not obligated to give any type of warranty. You should be happy that we give you one year of warranty. This got me totally pissed off. It just can’t be true that a big manufacturer like HP makes equipment that failes after one year and they deny any support. If I was the only one I wouldn’t mind. But it is a known problem and there are many people suffering from it. When you buy a laptop, even a business laptop you can reasonably expect it to work for more than one year… Well with HP it doesn’t. I won’t repair the laptop because the price to repair the darn thing is 66% of the price for a new one. Guess that I’ll buy a new one… and guess what… it definitly won’t be an HP…
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