So it all started in about April of this year. Suddenly my laptop starts freezing up and becoming unresponsive out of the blue, with zero warnings or indications that something went wrong. So I contacted the store I bought the laptop from, and they sent it off to get looked at it by their repair service. No hardware faults were found, and they concluded that it was a "Third party software issue".
It got factory reset, and the problem STILL persisted. I contacted HP, and they said that if the store didn't comply with their warranty promises, they'd replace the laptop. The store didn't honor their warranty, and I went to HP with this info, and they did a complete U-turn and said "OH NO WE CHANGED OUR MINDS, WE CAN'T DO ANYTHING!"
Several months later, it's now halfway through October and my problem still exists. I had a kernel 41 error event on startup, before I even got to my login screen! I paid over 2k for this, extended warranty included (which is still valid!). I'm incredibly upset by this, now I know to never buy an HP product again in the future, because they don't honor their warranty claims or support their customers!