Buyer beware: An HP Tablet PC returns the blue screen of death Paul asked me to warn everyone about a problem he’s having with a defective HP laptop. “They have a great Tablet PC, model HP tx2513cl, on sale at Costco for $999.99,” he says. “It ships with Vista Home Premium, and it’s a very nice little package — until you use the external monitor VGA port. Using that port causes a blue-screen error. The unit’s graphics card, an ATI Radeon HD3200, has known issues in this regard.” (A Google search on this topic reveals plenty of others having related problems.)I forwarded Paul’s e-mail — several times — to HP but so far have no response from them. Paul did a fair amount of legwork to isolate the problem, though, so be warned.“I have duplicated the problem consistently on two different units,” he explains. “I returned the first tablet to Costco without a problem and bought a second one; it had the same problem. I reported this to HP and got to upper-tier support but still got nowhere. One support person said it appeared there was an incompatibility between the ATI driver and the AMD chipset, and they were waiting on AMD for a fix. But they had no chipset-driver updates they could send me.” “Before I returned the second unit,” he says, “I bought a brand-new Samsung flatscreen to rule out incompatible drivers as an issue. The Samsung installed for Vista without a hitch, but within five minutes, the unit blue-screened. So, there’s a Tablet PC on the market with a known defect, and HP is still selling it as if nothing is wrong.” Technology Industry