ThinkPad X200 Tablet Save Extra 5%
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0.5 stars
"Very buggy with docking station"
Pros: Fast, highly configurable
Cons: Heavy, fan runs constantly, locks up frequently
Summary: I purchased an HP NX9010 with docking station in July 2004. It locks up (mouse stops, screen locks, must power down) any where from 5 minutes to 3 weeks after it is booted when connected to the docking station. I have been fighting this problem for seven months, spent hundreds of hours diagnosing it, and sent the computer in for repair four separate times. HP support has been the worst imaginable.
HP support said I am misusing the machine by expecting it to stay booted overnight: they claim their laptops are designed to only run for a few hours, then be turned off. Yet this machine is advertised as being a 'desktop replacement' and is available with a full docking station (which is why I purchased it).
Their support people are complete and total idiots. When you ask to talk to a manager, they say 'I am the manager, there is nobody else you can speak with.' As an IT consultant for multiple businesses, I can attest that HP support hires the most incompetent people that seem to have the poorest engineering skills. They just don't understand how computers work and have a HUGE attitude at the same time.
The 'manager' from HP said if I could not GUARANTEE that I could reproduce the intermittent lockup, they would not fix it. These morons simply do not understand that intermittent failures have no exact way to reproduce them and use that fact to wash their hands of any responsibility to fix problems.
After seven months and hundreds of hours debugging this pile of junk and sending it in for service 4 times (all returned 'No Problem Found') I finally did figure out the problem. Absolutely no thanks to HP and the problem was ENTIRELY caused by HP, not any of my installation or software as HP constantly claimed.
The end result: the Windows XP Ethernet driver for the FA311/312 (on the docking station) that is shipped with this unit is seriously broken, causing the system to intermittently freeze. By replacing the HP driver with the driver available from Netgear, my seven months of intermittent problems went away.
Avoid buying any HP computers: if you have a problem, you will end up dealing with the most arrogant idiots you could ever imagine. This company absolutely and completely does NOT care about their customers after the sale.
