A few weeks ago, my wife's laptop (an HP Pavillion dv2000 with an AMD Turion and Nvidia graphics) started acting strange. It would periodically not boot properly. All the lights would light up and the fans would turn on. I could see the hard drive light and the DVD light go on and I knew they were both spinning up. However, the screen remained blank. It wouldn't even flash with the backlights... nothing. There was no bios screen that would show, and no useful diagnostic beeps either. Usually popping the battery out and unplugging the power supply would fix the problem. However, this weekend, even that didn't seem to work very well.

I managed to get it booted back up and made sure it had the latest BIOS (which it did). I also checked the memory and the hard drive. No issues. Strange stuff. I managed to finally get it booted up again last night and I immediately turned off all the powermanagement, so it wouldn't turn itself off, and backed up my Wife's data from her home directory to my Ubuntu server.

For you linux geeks out there I used tar over ssh to backup her home drive. Its a quick and easy way to securely backup files to your server. 

tar czf - /home/foouser | ssh foo@foo.local tar xzf - -C /home/foouser/backups

Then I sat down and tried to find something that would help explain the issue. After some intense Google sessions I finally found this little piece of gold on the HP web site. The article "HP Pavilion dv2000/dv6000/dv9000 and Compaq Presario v3000/v6000 Series Notebook PCs - 
HP Limited Warranty Service Enhancement" gave me a ray of hope in an otherwise pretty blah week. 

The laptop was out of warranty about 6 months ago, but the following issue will be fixed by HP for free even if your warranty expired up to 24 months ago! Wonderful. Even better was that some of their systems seemed to be down today so the $49.95 service fee (which is refunded due to this issue anyways) couldn't be charged to my credit card. The service rep was wonderful to me and was very happy to help even though some of their systems seemed to be down. Even though he may have been inconvenienced, he didn't allow me to be inconvenienced by happily not letting that whole service fee get in the way of actually helping me with the problem. 

HP is sending me a box so I can ship the laptop (for free!) so they can take care of the problem (again for free!). Kudos to HP. So far this is one of the best service experiences I've had with a PC company.