HP Lies, or One Man's Quest to Get His Defective Computer Fixed: An Introduction

In late May/early June 2007, I purchased an HP Pavilion dv9000t laptop which included an nVidia GeForce Go 7600 video card chipset. I was very happy with this laptop for the first year and a half, until I started experiencing some minor problems in early 2009: freezing, distorted display, wireless connectivity loss, extreme heat/fan usage, etc. It just so happened my roommate Andy had the same computer model and was also experiencing these problems. In fact, his were significantly worse than mine, and got much worse over about a month, until soon his computer was unusuable. He discovered that our computers, specifically these nVidia chipsets, were defective, and were essentially burning out our motherboards. His was pretty much toast, and mine was definitely on its way, though for the time being, still functional. So Andy set about dealing with HP to get his fixed. As it turns out, HP had known about this problem and the defective video cards since November 2007 at the latest, and established an Enhanced Warranty Service for a small subset of the computers which had shipped with these defective parts. What benchmark HP used to determine which defective computers out of the thousands shipped would be eligible for this Enhanced Warranty remains a mystery. Not surprisingly, Andy's did not qualify, despite displaying the exact same symptoms and defective hardware as those systems that were repaired! So, after about 5 hours on the phone with different support people, he was able to secure a new motherboard for half of the original repair price. Keep in mind, this means that Andy paid out of his own pocket to repair a computer that had died due to defective hardware that was included when the computer was built. This was in June 2009. At this time, my computer was gradually worsening, a herald of things to come...