HP Pavilion DV6000 Laptop Wireless Failure – HP Says 1 in 7 Affected

If your wireless is failing for no reason on your HP Pavilion DV6000 laptop, call HP before your warranty runs out. An HP tech admitted that 1 in 7 of them require motherboard replacement to fix the problem. Not a BIOS upgrade or drivers.

[UPDATE] – It has now been released that the problem was possibly due to faulty heat handling on the NVidia G84 and G86 parts. The BIOS update, listed in the extended warranty, simply changes how the fan operates. That should give your product about enough time to function before the warranty runs out.

You should call HP to get your laptop serviced if your laptop is exhibiting the following behavior

• Wireless device no longer recognized
• Wireless switch doesn’t work
• Wireless will not come back after shutting down or going into a sleep mode

The HP Pavilion DV6000 is a fairly popular laptop. Available at many retail outlets and online, it happens to be the one that I decided to purchase just under a year ago.

It’s a decent machine and the price was right. My particular model is a DV6436nr that I picked up at Best Buy. After removing Vista and installing Ubuntu, the laptop was running rather well. However, the wireless was spotty at best.

I assumed that it was due to the difficulties that can occur with wireless and Linux. I followed all of the guides and installed all the drivers. Yet for some reason, my wireless just seemed to be getting worse. Eventually, the device would only work when it felt like it. I decided to go ahead and install Windows XP and see if I could get it working in that OS. No dice. My laptop was still within warranty so I decided to start looking around to see if anyone else was having this problem.

It wasn’t long before I came across this lengthy thread at the HP site. In it, “Anna” from HP says that updating the BIOS will fix the problem:

“Hi, it’s Anna from HP Total Care,

I’m sorry some of you are having trouble with your wireless WLAN not detecting your wireless network and not displaying in your device manager. The issue appears to be affecting AMD based Dv6000, v6000 and Dv9000 notebooks running Microsoft Windows Vista.

We’ve got a BIOS update and some instructions on getting this resolved. If the BIOS update does not resolve the issue, please contact HP support and we will help facilitate a repair.

Please do not try replacing your wireless card or inserting a third party wireless modules as some have suggested here on this forum. This will not resolve the issue and is in violation of FCC regulations.

[…Instructions on how to install the BIOS update…]

I hope this is helpful. Please let me know if you have any further questions and we’ll work to respond personally or on the forum as best we can.

Anna”

This solution was garbage and yielded no results. The switch on the front was basically useless and the device simply was not being recognized any longer. Frustrated, I searched further and found that this is a much more prevalent problem than I originally thought. Even ZDNet posted an article about the failure.

I eventually called HP to get my laptop repaired. As indicated in other posts, the solution is a motherboard replacement.

Here’s the kicker: the customer service agent who helped me when I called HP said:

“Yea, there’s about 1 in 7 laptops that are affected. But, there’s no way to tell which ones they are and that’s not enough to do a recall.”

Wow. The worst part is: the problem is hard to diagnose due to the fact that the device only works half the time. Instead of it being a problem with the wireless, or the drivers, or the BIOS, it’s a problem with the motherboard.

I’ll admit: the repair process was painless. They sent me a box overnight with shipping labels and I had my laptop back in a week or so. But come on HP: if 1 in 7 devices are failing and it’s hard to detect, help the consumer out and let them know.

Until then however, you can call HP at 800-474-6836.