Please recall HP Spectre X360 motherboard burned

[RRCA]

Yes, it was through the HP service center. 

Their repair quotes seem to be pretty random. They do not provide an itemized receipt, despite requesting it multiple times.

[JensT]

Yesterday my motherboard burned as well - the entire house smelled like electronics on fire!

How did you get hold of HP to discuss my options here?

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@LCx360 wrote:

My son's  HP Spectre X360 motherboard burned in october, 2016, when the laptop was out of warraty by about 2 to 3 months. He had to pay $100 to have his data including college course notes thasferred from the laptop to a flash drive. The laptop was about $1500 bought by a relative as a gift for his use at college.  I immeadiately bought another laptop of other brand sent to his college.

Today I was going to buy a new motherboard to fix this $1500 now junk, and found that there has been a lot HP Spectre X360 motherboards burned, so we need to make HP to recall this motherboard.

03/13/2017 Update: I have to say that HP has one of the best customer service in USA. The laptop was fixed by HP.

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[Phil34]

My daughter's HP Spectre X360 motherboard burned too recently when the laptop was out of warranty. It wouldn't charge and no light. My daughter had taken good care of laptop and was upset that her laptop died. I called tech support and they wanted me and pay $600 to replace the motherboard. I've had multiple laptops and they lasted much longer than this. We need to make HP to recall this.

[rick-s]

@Phil34

I have brought your issue to the attention of an appropriate team within HP. They will likely request information from you in order to look up your case details or product serial number. Please look for a private message from an identified HP contact. Additionally, keep in mind not to publicly post personal information (serial numbers and case details).

If you are unfamiliar with how the Forum's private message capability works, you can learn about that here.

Thank you for visiting the HP Support Forum.

[akaKJB]

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@Deficitspending wrote:

Well, why didn't HP go back and look up ALL the unhappy customers and compensate ALL of us?  It was the company's fault, not that of the customer.  Care to answer, HP? Or are you headed the way of successful corporations like Sears? 

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ooooohhhh - Now you're gettin' nasty.....

I like it. Keep it up!

[akaKJB]

I guess I get to toss another "me too" onto the pile.

I purchased some refurbished Spectre x360 13-4xxx's about 6 months ago for our production company to be used on and off screen for various programs we're working on. I've run service centers for electronics retailers in the past and one of the first things I discovered was that most refurbs are an excellent deal once you realize that you're usually paying a fraction of the cost for what's usually a brand new piece of equipment. Most refurbs happen because they find something wrong when it's tested at the end of the production line. That unit is then usually completely gone over by a bench tech who fixes any faults they can find. In short, a refurb unit has had more attention paid to it than a unit that tested as good when it came off the line.

Until a few weeks ago, I thought my Spectre x360 was the latest example of spending less money on equal or better quality than one "new in the box".  I felt the unit get hotter than usual (these models run notoriously hot; it's been mentioned in most reviews} and noticed the battery level was low - around 20% - so I plugged in the power supply. To my surprise, the battery continued to drain. That was when I noticed the unit hadn't recognized the external power input and was also beginning to emit an acrid smell. I've been around enough failing electronics to recognize the smell of an overheated circuit board. I've seen boards actually ignite when I've come across that smell before so I powered it down immediately. It had actually gotten hot enough that it discolored a small spot on the wooden table it was sitting on.

After letting it cool down, I plugged the power supply back into the unit. 

Nothing happened. No smell but no orange charging light, either.  I pressed the power button and the system booted but was only recognizing the internal battery.  I immediately hit the HP forums and found an astounding number of similar incidents with this product line in particular. I tried doing some of the fixes suggested such as a hard reset, trying a different/new power supply, running the hardware diagnostics with the battery connected and again with it disconnected, etc. Nothing changed except the power level on my battery. Finally, the battery was fully depleted and I had to see if I could find a  hardware reason for the malfunction. All of the wires connecting the power input to the motherboard, a problem that has been identified as the cause of similar malfunctions, appeared to be intact.

One of the plastic connectors on the battery, the one right next to the spot where the battery plugs into the motherboard, was broken. There weren't any small bits of plastic rattling around inside the unit so this had to be damage that happened before or during the refurb process. There didn't seem to be any other damage around it but I thought there was a chance that whatever caused the connector to break could have done something to the battery so a new battery was installed and the system booted up.

The only change was that I now had around 45% of a battery charge, thanks to the fact the new one came partially pre-charged.  At least this gave us the opportunity to try some of the other battery specific diagnostics, none of which found a single thing wrong with it.

We did notice something odd when we disconnected the battery to help conserve what was left of the charge. The cord for the power supply was inadvertently plugged into the unit when we pulled the battery's connector.  The charging light next to the external power input came on.  The light displayed constant white, the color for a fully charged battery, with no blinking or any other kind of change. We decided to try booting the system to see if it was actually recognizing the power supply. The system booted immediately.

Hoping that this meant we'd managed to trigger some kind of reset, remap or something similar, we shut the unit down and reattached the battery. We then plugged the power supply back in and got absolutely nothing.  No orange charge light (or any other color, for that matter) and no external power supply recognized by the system after we booted it using the battery.  We tried plugging in the original battery and got the same result. 

We're going to go ahead and replace the external power supply connector. The part should be here tomorrow but I'm doubting this will be the solution. Hoping for the best but completely expecting to be disappointed. 

We have been able to use the unit a bit by just using the external power supply but haven't wanted to use it too much, just in case running it without the battery installed for too long creates some other kind of tech issue.  One interesting observation is that the machine runs MUCH cooler than it ever has with the batteries plugged in, which makes me wonder if all these 'burn' issues aren't connected to the batteries somehow.

Regardless what component is causing the issue, these are obviously factory/design flaws. There's more than enough incidents reported on HP's own forums to warrant a recall and replacement.  If HP continually refuses to recognize that fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the company finds itself looking down the barrel of a class action lawsuit.  This product line costs far too much money to tolerate shoddy, potentially dangerous malfunctions, sometimes within weeks of purchase. My personal unit, the one in question, lists a 'born on' date in the bios of March 2017.  Refurbished unit or not, under warranty or not, there's just NO good excuse for a $1200 laptop to fry itself within 6 months.  Frankly, there's no good excuse for it frying in the ways described in these forums ever.  

I've been an HP customer for both personal and business computers for decades and I have never seen quality control this bad. I was willing to spend a few extra bucks for even a refurb Spectre x360 because my last HP laptop, the absolutely brilliant TouchSmart tm2, has lasted for years. The only reason I even considered a new laptop was due to a few things that the memory & processor on the tm2 just couldn't handle. Before that happened, I was actively collecting the parts to give it a backlit keyboard, SSD, an internal Bluetooth card and even a gyro module that could be retrofitted into the tm2. When I have a little time, I'm still going to make those modifications and use it as the main interface for the various entertainment and automated systems in our offices/studio.  I really hope that the quality issues at HP are limited to the models we've seen in the forums recently.  I'd hate to see a company who produced the best performing, highest quality and best-looking laptop I'd ever owned become the company responsible for selling me what could potentially be the worst quality laptop I've ever owned (build quality aside, the x360 performs well when I can actually use the bloody thing and is beautiful to look at in both the silver and ash silver shells). 

[kevin-t]

@akaKJB

I have brought your issue to the attention of an appropriate team within HP. They will likely request information from you in order to look up your case details or product serial number. Please look for a private message from an identified HP contact. Additionally, keep in mind not to publicly post personal information (serial numbers and case details).

If you are unfamiliar with how the Forum's private message capability works, you can learn about that here.
Thank you for visiting the HP Support Forum.

[Cujo90]

Hey Kevin, I hate to necro a thread as old as this, but this one seemed like it was actually getting somewhere beneficial. A less tech savvy family member just gave me an X360 Pro G2 with a dead motherboard (looks like a small cap near the CPU socket blew shortly out of warranty) in the hopes that it might be something I could fix easily to forward my photography work. I just spoke with a rep who didn't even quote me a price for repair 4 months or so out of warranty now, indicating that it would only be done AFTER I paid to ship the unit in for evaluation, which by the looks of it will run me between $5-600 and might buy me a few months. Am I just SOL here, or can someone please help me out? I've loved my HP products in the past, and this would be a huge boon to me, but this seems like a very serious issue.

[RNIEMEYER]

Sorry to tell you this. Solution is to buy another computer and never go back to HP again. Exactly what I´ve done. Bought myself two macbook pro´s and will NEVER look at any other HP product in my life. Even trashed my HP printer and bought a cannon. So long HP, out of my and my friends life. Worse computer and customer service ever experienced.

[Ulcerrator]

Im in the same boat with Hp over this issue, been ongoing for almost a month now dealing with Phone support.

They acknowledged the issue then said they will not charge labour but i have to pay for the motherboard.

Gonna keep fighting till they fix it with no charge as its thier design fault!

Thanks for the tip.