Tonight I went to Fry's to exchange my dv1000.

First, I should have read my comments first... Ian says:

"My toshiba m200 has the same problem although from what I've read it needs a certain type of SD card, my bog standard ones apparently aren't good enough.."

Which would have been good to know...

Anyway, net result - I go to Fry's and after a bit over an hour I had attempted to use a second refurbished machine and got the same failure on the SD card, and the second machine was actually missing parts. I returned the machine and decided to order a new one online.

Costco's price was a bit higher than HP's direct price, and HP could get the machine here faster. I ended up getting not my exact specifications, because the preconfigured machines ship about 1 week faster. Basically I had to buy an extra 20GB of storage (up to 100GB) and get a 1 year warranty.

My wife really wants the replacement by the weekend (given that we are now having to re-order), so we sprung for next day shipping. We missed the deadline for today's orders by 3 hours, so it should ship Tuesday and be here Wednesday morning. Kinda cool.