zx5000 - why is this notebook such a peice of garbage?

[Darkphreekquenc]

First off let me say that i repair computers/driving and flight simulators for a living, i am not an exagerator or a know it all  but i know what i am doing, please take some time to answer these questions rather than telling me useless information such as "make sure everything is connected or try to reformat the drive" please dont insult my intelligence this problem has been trying my patience for some time.

OK , so i will most likely never buy another HP product again and i will almost allways recommend a dell or toshiba notebook to any of my clients, maybe you can change my mind. 

first of all after having the thing for a few months the DC jack broke loose from the motherboard (common problem , and you know it is, funny how you ignore it) 

so after ripping apart this giant paperweight i got a new jack all soldered in, took me a few times and alot of tiem prepping the pcb but i finally got an unbreakable connection. OK so great the laptop works again.

Nope, now when it starts up for some reason the battery is not charging but the computer works on the power from the wall. You would think it was a battery but nooooo, after a great big headache and a few days i figured out its a BIOS problem and a flash will fix it, thats the second huuuge mistake .Then As soon as i started it up after fixing that the 5 month old hard drive fails, really great stuff here guys, ive never considered Hitachi to be a quality drive but this is just ridiculous. 

so now i finally have a new drive, I install it , and go to use the dvd drive to install windows, Funny thing is now the DVD drive isnt working. no power at all and its not being detected in the bios (not that you could really do anything from the BIOS anyway because it sucks)

I took the notebook apart again to find the problem. 

Turns out the connector that connects the dvd player to the board is loose, all of its tiny IDE pins are comming right out of the board, did you use  duck tape to hold your components toghether?? Seriously they dont even look like they were soldered. The craziest thing about this is that its made so when you slide the dvd drive in all of its force gets put directly on that connector. wonder why it broke. Id love to have a chat with your systems engineer, he needs a refresher course in common sense. 

here we are to the issue i am now experiencing, 

Since the dvd drive is dead i took the HD out of the laptop and installed winows on it from another laptop. Eveything went well and windows installed fine ( i used the OS recovery cd that came with my HP laptop) When i transfered the drive back it will not boot, windows attempts to start and then a blue screen that restarts the computer faster than i can read it. Do you still keep some driver or BIOS information on the HD like the old Compaqs??  ive been messing with it for 2 days now and i just cant get a working hard drive in the computer and since the BIOS is so "hi tech" i cant even boot from a USB cdrom drive. Im sorry if this seems harsh but your company makes inferior products. All the marketing in the world doesnt replace quality of parts and service. This is the reason our economy is in shambles, everyone wants to make big money and thats all that matters. tell your CEO to take a salary cut to spend the extra couple bucks for some quality components, maybe he can buy me a new laptop, because i cant afford to right now, one $2400 paperweight is enough for me. 

Anthony 

[Huffer]

Anthony, the zx5000 is several (at least 4) years old let's just establish that for the record first. Secondly, we are not HP so "we" did not make that laptop. "We" are just computer users and free to be honest in our assessment. The zx5000 and zv5000 are virtually the same laptop. I owned a zv5000 for well over two years. It is the longest I have ever owned a single laptop. It was powerful and stable and never gave me a problem, but it sat on my desk as my office computer because it was just too big to try to carry around. After two years I sold it to a colleague who wanted a gaming laptop for his high school aged son. Two months later he brought it back to me with a broken power pin. Was that a manufacturing defect? I think not. It was user abuse. Now, to be fair the zv5000, zx5000 and zv6000 have had their share of power pin problems and there was even a class action about the issue which settled in early 2008. I never got notice and I am guessing you live outside the U.S. so you might not have been included. But, bottom line, power pins do not just break. Neither do ide connections. Also, it is very difficult to do the power pin jack soldering 100% correctly. I wonder if your power problems after the repair might have had something to do with how you did the repair? Just a suggestion.

If you install Windows on the drive on another machine it loads those chipset drivers and you will get a bluescreen if you try to put the drive into another computer with a different main chipset. I suggest a DOS install of Windows XP by making the hard drive bootable on another machine to a C:/> prompt and copy the i386 folder from the XP CD onto it and then DOS load XP on the zx5000 from that hard drive. Post back for more detailed instructions. 

So here you are on a forum complaining about the build quality of a 4 year old machine that has lasted well beyond the normal life of a laptop. What is it exactly you want us to do? You can go buy a Dell for your next laptop.  But before you do ask somebody who works on laptops his or her assessment of the Inspiron 1100 and Inspiron 5100. They came out from Dell about the same time as the zx5000 from H.P. Talk about a piece of junk.

I am not defending HP. Heck, I do not even own an HP laptop, I am a Lenovo user.  HP has issues and it is true that quality control and good design seem to have gone out the window, but I do not understand how the zx5000 worked for you for all these years if it was a piece of junk from the factory.  

Message Edited by Huffer on 01-22-2009 08:46 AM

[Darkphreekquenc]

I appreciate the help, To be honest i didnt even think of loading the hard drive that way, Been a while since ive had to do that lol. My frustration comes from the fact that 3 years and 8 months ago is when the power pin broke and my father was simply plugging the charger in and all these problems started happening (BIOS , Hard drive  all within the first 2 years). I imagine this laptop was in one of the first lines of production. It was my fathers computer untill about a month ago, but i take care of it when it has problems and he just got a new one as this one has not worked for a while ( i live in FL he lives in NY) . I was even more frustrated at the fact that when i called HP to ask about everything they gave me the runaround, every time. It takes an hour to even get them to understand that youve made sure everything is plugged in correctly and the power is on. That is why i posted here, i thought there was possibly some forum admin's from HP who would read this.

Ive had a good amount of experiance soldering so i dont think any issues stem from that, it was actually a really clean job. I guess you could say the dvd drive may have been inserted with too much force at one time but all of the force to even make the connector slide in rests on the pins in the board, not a very solid design. I do have to say that the laptop as a whole if it had no problems is a beast even today. I get great render times with Maya and after effects. the pentium 4 was a really good chip for 3d processing. and the ATI graphics card keeps up in viewport performance. I just had a really bad experiance and i think these companies make far too much money on commercial pc's. When they make a mistake they can afford to fix it and they should. 

[Huffer]

You need a good Windows 98 boot CD .iso. Put the hard drive in another machine, boot from the CD (or floppy if you can do that) and just make the hdd DOS bootable with format C: /s. Then copy over the smartdrv.exe file and the config.sys and autoexec.bat and himem.sys so you can activate smartdrv.exe. Copy the contents of the i386 folder on the XP install CD to the hard drive into a folder called something like "Winxp". Now put the drive into the zx5000. At the C:\> prompt activate smartdrv.exe, then change directories to the winxp you made and then just run winnt.exe and you will be installing XP onto the zx5000 without a working CD drive.

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm