A few months ago near the end of August, I was shopping around for a laptop for college (Computer Science Major), I'd researched a few different laptops, but none really caught my eye like this one did. In short, it is a beautiful looking laptop that is incredibly light. The Best Buy rep at the store was very helpful in getting me the student discount and sale discount, with made me very happy. I took this laptop home and was excited to use it for the upcoming semester. I was very impressed with its clear, bright, full HD touch screen and comfortable keyboard, and good performance with its ssd and Ryzen cpu. I wish I could have gone on more about how I like this laptop, but a glaring issue and serious oversight by hp has made owning this thing a nightmare.
About a month into my ownership of the laptop, the WiFi adapter began to give out. At the end of September I began to notice that the WiFi would randomly disconnect for about a minute. No big deal, I thought, I thought that maybe the signal dropped in my room for some reason, or maybe a hiccup in the drivers caused me to disconnect. However, over the next few days, the rate of the WiFi disconnects increased exponentially, up to a point where it would connect for about 15 seconds, then disconnect for 30, and not show any available networks. Of course this made the laptop virtually unusable, frustrated, this began my troubleshooting.
I tried everything from updating windows, updating drivers, rolling back updates, updating the BIOS, running hardware diagnostics, and even resetting the computer to factory settings. Looking into windows event viewer showed me that the problem was the Intel Dual Band Wirelesss AC 7265 WiFi adapter. (see screenshot 1) Hours of troubleshooting did absolutely nothing to fix it, leaving me with only one option: sending my laptop to hp for repair.
I contacted customer service, went through the usual questions, "did you reset windows?", "did you run the diagnostic tool?" etc. and eventually got sent a shipping box via expedited overnight shipping (nice!). I sent the laptop in along with a detailed summary of what I'd already tried and waited the usual 5 business days only to get it back.......still broken (not nice..) You can see screenshot 2 and see that the same errors in event viewer were popping up.
According to the repair report they sent with the laptop, they replaced the wireless adapter, which is what I believed to be the problem too. Which at this point meant that I either got very unlucky and got another faulty adapter, or, that part wasn't the issue in the first place. Cue the customer service call...
After an hour long customer service phone call trying to explain that my problem wasn't fixed the first time, I was sent another box, and another day later I send my laptop back, and a week later......well nothing. (By the way, apparently they can't actually just replace my laptop until after it's sent in for repairs 3 times within a year. Great policies right??)
I still don't have my laptop back, and it's been 2 more weeks. And as of today (10/30) will be another week, totaling a month of me not having it. My repair has already been delayed twice without explanation. The customer service rep only tells me that it's pending repair, giving me no new info.
So all in all, I've been WITHOUT my $700 laptop for as l have been with it. Absolutely unacceptable as a student and Computer Science major who needs access to a computer literally every single day. HP really needs to get their quality control department together and test these PC's longer before they release them. So if you wan't to take a risk and buy this laptop, the specs are good, the design is nice, and its fast for its price range, however, you are still taking a risk of getting faulty hardware. Unfortunately for myself, I was one of the unlucky ones.