New(ish) HP Pavilion Given Up The Ghost

Soldato
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Already dropped it off at the Spicy Food retailer for their repair "service" but retrospectively just want to garner some idea of what might be wrong.

It's a HP Pavilion I5 laptop with 8Gb of RAM, a 128Gb SSD and 500Gb secondary HD with Nvidia GTX950 grafted to the Intel GPU. Windows 10... Bought just under three months ago.

Working fine on Saturday but when I tried to POST this afternoon, got the HP logo for about two seconds, then a black screen and the fan died. Tried again, same thing. Unable to get into BIOS. Tried removing the battery and power then doing the 15 second hold down of the power button to discharge the residual power. On the first occasion only I was able to get into some sort of Windows troubleshooting screen but none of the utilities - check disc, restore to factory default would work. After that I tried the power discharge several times but just the black screen.

I have noticed in use the laptop was getting very hot, with lots of fan activity even running not particularly GPU heavy apps.

My smart money is that the SSD has died but I guess could be just about anything. The Spicy Food ones seem to reckon it could be up to a week while it goes away to Newark for diagnosis and repair.
 
Soldato
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York
Lol as if they have a clue, just spout utter crap like they know what they are talking about, I hope they get it sorted but some of these generic machines seem to be utter garbage nowadays.
 
Soldato
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Never had great experiences with HP laptops, always slower than the specs would suggest and get very hot with minimal tasks.
 
Soldato
OP
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Swindon UK
As the laptop is just under three months old, if it is fubar and they offer a replacement - am I still entitled to a refund instead? At least then I can take the money and order a custom built chassis from OCUK or one of the companies that offer this.

Edit:
Just wondering if this is symptomatic of the heatsink becoming detached from the CPU and/or GPU? Would explain why it starts and almost immediately go into limbo. If that is the case, let's hope Currys use Arctic Silver or another quality paste when they put it back!
 
Last edited:
Soldato
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...and the diagnosis from "Knowhow" was Operating System failure. They have kindly reset everything to factory condition including formatting the D drive with all my data on it and of course all the assorted carp from HP I'd painstakingly removed is back on there.

Doesn't explain why I couldn't get into BIOS or address the overheating issue.

At least I've got it back, FWIW.
 
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