HP laptop = nightmare?

Recently, I got hold of a HP laptop and here's the awkward experience.

The laptop is a HP tx1000, or more precisely a downgraded version without the touchscreen and stylus and with the product number, it is identified as tx1215nr.

I got it from a friend because he was absolutely unable to boot it and everything stops with a blank screen before the BIOS logo etc. I usually fixes stuff! I searched on google like crazy and found a post by a Taiwan guy. I followed his instructions by turning the computer on and keep it in the towels for an hour. (That's his standard. Mine didn't get that hot the first time and I had to make it hotter with more blankets and turning it on twice because it turns off automatically when over heated). I can't find the post right now but he explained it helped the mal-soldering of the nvidia video card.

I have only had one boot problem ever since (and I was scared...) but I've noticed a lot of problems with this designs. Two people out of the ones I know have had HP laptops without problems. A few others have had broken hard drives and motherboards. The motherboard or video chip is not HP's fault possibly but I think they do have responsibilities in not thoroughly testing their products out. Of course, the problems usually appear after a year (the same time warranty expires, sad coincidence...). And below I list a few things that I noticed that should be improved (just out of common sense...) (And I believe I'm not the only one having problems with HP designs, Shiny gave very sad reviews on youtube about tx1000 too).

1. I got rid of Vista asap because it is too slow, and the CPU is generating so much heat(cf. 2). There are not alternative drivers to download, so now that I'm dual booting XP and Ubuntu. XP sometimes fails to shutdown and the quick launch buttons become useless.

2. Sort of along the same line as 1, HP gives so little space for configuration and I'm talking about this in comparison to Dell. There's nothing you can do in the HP BIOS whereas in a Dell computer, you can turn off unused devices like a modem and other on-board devices. You can turn off nothing and as mentioned in 1, drivers are not provided. So very little space for configuration and I don't understand the reason. I guess they chose pissing off customer over pissing off business partners.

3. AMD processors give out too much heat. Definitely not suitable for smaller laptops. I don't know if HP got a great contract from AMD or not, I think running Vista on this computer with average work load for a few hours is certainly going to ruin the laptop in about a year. And I don't know why the engineers didn't realize it. The CPU temperature is constantly above 60 or 70, or more. The Dell Inspiron 1300 runs much more smooth and causes much less problems under XP and it has so much less processing power. So with so much more to do so much less, I'd definitely say it's definitely a design flaw.

HP just have so many REDUNDANT things like the touchpad lock. Other computers don't have it but we seldom run into troubles. I'm glad your touchpads are sensitive but we have to fiddle with the button all the time... Just design a soft lock and count characters per 5 seconds typed and if it is above a threshold, then disable the touchpad. I wonder if some other companies already have it.

Well, HP did let us format the hard drive and reinstall other systems easily at least on this laptop (which is even untrue or some others). I don't know what is going on with HP's designs but the HP laptops just seem to have the worst of all others but no highlight of their own.

Note: For those who are using smplayer in Linux or mplayer for windows, if it doesn't show videos, go to preferences->general->video tab and change dx(fast) to gl(fast). Then it'll work.