HP Warranty - please help

[inssane]

Long story short, I think my HP DV4T is like a month over warranty, and it doesn't recognize any USB ports, as well as the Hard Drive is now failing (this is the second time HP would have to replace).

I called them last week and blah blah, told them I had a legit Windows 7...they said that it voids the warranty because it was sold with Vista on it!!
WTF
I told him that that was insane considering they sell Windows 7 and load them on current computers.

What is my work around? I don't have the original recovery disk.
Nick

 

[3devious]

If your hard drive is dying, it doesn't matter what disk you have. Just tell them that when you boot it, it is giving you Master File table errors when it trys to repair the disk, it can't and you are stuck in a reboot loop. Just see if they will send you a drive to switch out and pray that your USB problem is a software issue.

Have you opened up your machine before? You just might want to make sure that everything is connected nicely. (I've shorted my USB ports before and it isn't pretty.) Please post again after you see if anyone at HP is willing to help you out.

 

[inssane]

I will have to do that - thanks.
The USB issues is very annoying but not the end of the world. It actually will not work for weeks, then it will work for a few days. I have a PC with working ports.

Hopefully they will honor the warranty even though it is over - because this is the second time with the same thing.

 

[dphorr01]

I've seen USB ports fail often due to unplugging devices without first telling the OS to release them. If you go into the device manager and disable and then enable the hubs this clears up. Be careful though, if you keyboard and mouse or on the same hub disabling that hub can be cause some problems.

 

[3devious]

dphorr01, that is most certainly true. The front usb controller of my computer is messed up because I had my headset plugged into it and my dog freaked out one day and got her self tangled up in the cord. She ripped the headset out of the port so vigorously that it took a piece of that port with the connector. The port never did work correctly after that. If I plugged a device into it, my computer started having power issues.
After that incident, the other USB port on the front of my computer is pretty tempermental and I have to be careful not to shake the cable of anything plugged into it lest Windows decides that it doesn't see the device anymore until the machine is rebooted. The mouse that was plugged into the that second port has never worked again.