Laptop Rant!

[ApolloIV]

I've had a HP dv9000 for a bit over a year now and it seems like all it does is give me troubles. I've sent it in once because the mobo crapped out on it and now I think I might have to see if I can send it in again. I installed mandriva 2009 on a 10gb partition and I loved it. I have had it on there for about a week just messing with the in and outs of it and deciding if i wanted to keep it over Fedora which I think i might. Now I think I'm boned! Mandriva has a hardware configuration tool which I used to get a driver for my Nvidia card. Well after configuring it i had to log out to restart the xserver but when i went to log back in it just gave me a black screen then shot me back to the logon screen. I tried to restart and boot into single user mode to see if i could changed the config file but all my laptop did was beep during post. 1 long and 2 short which is a video error.... I'm unable to get past post. I've done a lot of research and I've taken out the rtc batter to reset the cmos, reseated the ram, all the easy stuff but it still didn't help. I think by changing the driver it might have fried my card which i guess is known to happen to dv9000's.

Specs are : intel 1.5ghz, 2gb ram, 160gb hdd, nvidia 8600gs m

I'm really unhappy with HP atm. I have some friends that have dells and acers some have dual boots and some don't and no one I know has had troubles. I'm doubting HP in making reliable products anymore.