As promised, here is my follow up. First, an aside, in a few posts above Sersoft mentions fixing it with screws and washers. If you look back through this forum post, you'll see that I did that and it worked... for a while. The problem is that the screw screws directly into the plastic housing which is extremely close to the heatsink. Once that plastic breaks, no screw or washer will fix it. It is FUBAR. I also never threw this laptop or excessively opened and closed it. It broke simple because of the bad design. Just wanted to get that out there.
On to dealing with HP. After many phone calls, and "negotiations" I was delivered a box to send the unit back to HP (overnight, free shipping) to see if it could be repaired. The agreed upon price to fix it was $96.51, which was placed as a hold on my card while the laptop was being deemed worthy or non-worthy to fix. I got some emails and calls from HP, mostly verification that it had arrived, was being looked at, etc... No one told me that it was being fixed until it was on its way back to me. That was a little annoying, but it is what it is. The laptop arrived earlier then they estimated (in the snow, none the less) and I'm currently typing this up on it. For $92.51 HP performed the following:
NEW BASE ENCLOSURE
NEW FAN - HEAT SINK
NEW KEYBOARD
NEW SYSTEM BOARD (motherboard)
NEW TOP COVER – TOUCHPAD
Not too shabby! Right now it's working as it should with my only complaint being that there was a piece of plastic left in the body so I had to remove the top bevel to get that out (didn't really bother me, not sweating the small stuff). I am still very weary of the left hinge and fear that it's only a matter of time before it fails as the first one did. Here's hoping it will not.
Now if HP had reached out to me when I first posted about this in September of 2011 and offered that price for the fix, as opposed to the $255.00 plus taxes that they did offer, I would have taken it straight away and been glad to pay so little for a pretty big fix for a machine that was out of warranty. As this thread goes to show, that didn't happen. The new push to improve relations between customer and consumer seemed to help this issue get recognized (I'm sure that also has to do with this thread popping up in google search results), I still don't have faith in HP products. For me this was too little, too late. While I was apologized to and the people I talked to seemed genuinely sorry, it still took close to three years to see any action taken. With that being said...
Jeff and everyone else (don't want to post names of people who didn't interact on this forum) were very nice and easy to talk to. I was even on the phone the first night with rescue services for a good hour and a half to try and get my biometric reader working. The person assisting me really went out of his way to try and resolve this issue. Unfortunately this couldn't be done (this is actually a good thing, security wise), because of the motherboard being different from the original install. Rescue sent me out brand new recovery disks at no charge (I have no idea what I did with mine, so I was clearly in the wrong here), and after a quick backup and recovery, the finger print reader is once again working. Again, thank you to all of my points of contact for all of your help.
So here I am today. The laptop is back to how it was when I first bought it. I will continue to read and respond to posts in this thread, I'm not just going to jump ship.
Everyone else having issues, if Jeff reaches out to you, respond! If no one ever reached out, reach out to them! Explain the issue; even point them at this post. Your mileage may vary, but it's worth a shot. Ideally, I would have loved for HP to eat crow and admit to a default and replace/repair the unit with no charge, but it's not a perfect world. I'll post in here from time to time to keep you updated on how this "new" machine is holding up.