r2i forum

Having fun with laptop repairs.

I fixed my out of warranty Samsung laptop days ago. It was randomly showing BSOD. I suspected memory. It had 2 sticks of 2GB each. I pulled out one at a time, found out the bad one and replaced it with a 4GB stick which didn't cost me more than $16. It is now working well and faster since the total is 6GB.

With that inspiration I pulled out my son's Gateway laptop that was abandoned 2 years ago. It was randomly crashing with a disturbed display, showing funny random patterns. I thought it was either a bad video chip or mother board and bought a new laptop for him. Now I started thinking that it might be memory too. It also has 2 sticks of 2GB each. I pulled out one at a time, and no matter which one is running, it runs fine even though at a reduced speed because of lesser RAM. I am still not convinced. I ran memory diagnostics from USB drive on each RAM separately, in one slot at a time, all 4 combinations, but didn't find any problem. Now I try that again with both the sticks plugged in, and here we go it fails. After swapping the modules in their slots also it fails. It is most likely not the memory or video chip. Didn't try to buy new memory modules since they are outdated (DDR2) and expensive.

Thought of sharing..

HP has one of the worst customer service people. Their support is outsourced to India and you should see the attitude of these people who talk on the phone. I think the value of customer is dropped to dead zero if you are an indian customer. The useless tech who i was working with put me on hold for more than 2 hours briefly talking to me every 20 mins that he is still checking some thing. The issue was with battery and with a prior work exp with Dell i diagnosed the issue and had the dispatch code ready for the tech, all he had to do was to update his ticket with dispatch id and send me a battery for that he took 2 hours and said he cannot do anything. When i said i did not have the whole day to spend on the phone he said call us back when you have a day, he refused to give his name again or his employee id and when asked for a manager he said he was the manager, totally rude. I started a chat with a tech on their website while talking to him and got the battery replaced, but this useless a$$hole would not help i would have slapped him on the face for his behavior. That was simply wrong. I escalated the issue to BBB and gave them the details of ticket and experience, then after a month a lady from US office called me back and told me they are taking action against the agent and they were sorry for what happened. But that's all, after this incident i made a resolution not to buy any HP products and i don't think HP has invented anything as of yet that made me regret my decision.