A few months back I mentioned I was getting a new laptop under warranty replacement from HP; an HDX18 to be specific.
Well, the last month or two, the sucker has been running hot...real hot... uncomfortably hot. So hot that sometimes when running I couldn't touch the bottom of it.
Now, that isn't necessarily a replacement issue; lot's of laptops run very hot. So I got one of those little laptop cooler stands, and soldiered on.
Then the heat killed the fingerprint sensor... but I didn't want the bother of dealing with another replacement so I didn't call it in. After all I really don't care about the fingerprint sensor.
Then the heat started making the backlight on the screen get dimmer, and killing my battery life. I could actually feel the heat through the closed screen.
Ok at that point I was saying "damn I need to call HP and get this thing replaced"... but I still didn't want to deal with it again. This would be the third new laptop in less than a year, and it's WEEKS of being unproductive until I get things sorted right the way want them...
Finally, in the last couple days, the soft buttons (they're touch sensitive and backlit bits, like on apple products, but there's no physical button) stopped working, and the wifi started shutting itself off; and it started crashing.
Then yesterday while I was trying to back the thing up, kablooey. The hard drive started click of deathing me.
It's dead Jim.
That particular time, it got so hot that the part of the case by the main heat sink vent actually bubbled and charred a bit.
.
HP is sending out a mailer for it shortly it looks like it's going to be a total write-off and I'll end up with a "new" (more likely remanufactured) machine.
Now I need to figure out how bad the data corruption was, and how long it was going for, because some of the files I thought were cleanly back up definitely were not, starting from more than a month ago. It looks like I may have lost a TON of work, pictures, research, and other important crap that I thought I had copied safely elsewhere.
Not the first time I was an idiot and didnt verify my backups. Made worse by the fact that I replaced my storage array about two months ago, and haven't been doing my regularly automated backups since (I haven't bothered to reconfigure them for the new array).
I've got to do that tonight, or tomorrow.
