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

— Technology

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.

Javascript – Removing All Select (Drop-Down) Elements from a Page

— Geekery, Technology

The greybox effect that we use for our images in the project that I was working on had a small flaw. Unfortunately, in IE6 (go figure), drop-down menus were showing through whenever a user had expanded the image on the screen.

This was obviously not desirable.

I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for on the net so I decided to share my snippet of code with everyone out there in case another person was trying to achieve this (or a similar) effect.

Our code uses a toggle for the grey box stuff so we had to make sure one check would be able to take care of all of the select menus on the page:

var dropDowns = document.getElementsByTagName('select');
for (var ii = 0; ii < dropDowns.length; ii++) {
   if (dropDowns[ii].style.display == 'none') {
      dropDowns[ii].style.display = '';
   } else {
      dropDowns[ii].style.display = 'none';
   }
}

This could be used for any type of tag so hopefully others will be able to use this.

Enjoy!

Albert Hofmann, Inventor of LSD – Dead at 102

— Misc

[UPDATE] – It has been confirmed. The email from Rick Doblin (head of MAPS) has been published here. In addition, Erowid has updated their site here. Here’s the contents of the message from Mr. Doblin:

“Albert died at home at 9 AM Basel time from a myocardial infarction, quick and relatively painless. Two caretakers were there with him at the time. The only people who were told were people from Burg, the village where he lived, and Peter and others were surprised the word of his death had gotten out so quickly. It’s the age of the internet…

Albert had been increasingly thinking of death these last few months. He had stopped leaving his home, where he said he could feel the spirit of Anita, his wife who died December 20, 2007. He didn’t come to the World Psychedelic Forum a month ago, but did entertain some visitors at his home. We spoke on the phone the day after the Basel conference and he was happy and fulfilled. He’d seen the renewal of LSD psychotherapy research with his own eyes, as had Anita. I said that I looked forward to discussing the results of the study with him in about a year and a half and he laughed and said he’d try to help the research however he could, either from this side or “the other side”.”

[UPDATE] – A comment left in an article on boingboing about the subject states that confirmation has been obtained from Rick Doblin, head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

According to a post made by a reddit.com contributor named t4inted:

Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD, passed away last night.

Here is the quote:

“This isn’t in the news yet. I’m from Basel and Hoffmann lived close (in Burg). My friends mother helped to look after him, he died last night (of old age probably, he was 102).

You might not belive one source you don’t know and who has no way to back up his claims but it’s true. It will probably go public soon.”

I hope that I get to update this page later and say it was a hoax.

But if it is true, then we can only hope that he is dancing and happy.

Thanks Mr. Hofmann. You changed human kind forever.