20 years ago when I worked in retail selling computers, we had moderately high end HP laptop at a great sale price with an extra RAM slot that many customers opted to get a stick for.
We started getting returns immediately and once we started inspecting the laptops, we saw that the extra DIMM slot didn't even have any lines connecting it on the motherboard.
HP tried to insist that they wouldn't credit us for the returned defective computers without us signing an NDA, which we refused but still shipped back all the units from our entire chain of retail stores. This was many thousands of units and they probably lost an assload on the returns.
Their products have been garbage for a long, long time.
I'd argue HP has both really good products and some of the most awful products in history. I remember getting one of their first tablets (called TX2000Z) and it was such a hunk of crap. On the flipside, I still have several Z-series workstations that are extraordinarily good and, having dual processor slots, allowed me to beef them up on a budget.
Dell did something similar to me, but way scummier a decade ago with my Dell XPS L702x.
I bought it spec'd down with the intent to upgrade it myself with parts I had a better deal for. It was advertised as having two DIMM slots, and I ordered it with only one small stick of RAM because I had a source for two of the largest supported sticks.
When I got the Computer, there was only one DIMM slot. The technicians had me take the entire thing apart looking for the second slot under they keyboard, but instead I found a an entire unpopulated part of the board with the words "DIMM 2" printed on it, with no slot to put another stick of RAM into.
When I figured out that they had lied in their spec sheet, I asked for a replacement motherboard with two DIMM slots. They explained that for computers ordered with less than 2 sticks of RAM, they use a single-slot board.
I pointed out that the line "2x DIMM" was on my order, and they complained that the only in-stock version of the motherboard that was compatible with 2 sticks of RAM was the version for the 3D version of the laptop which would require the complete replacement of my computer with a better processor and better monitor.
After calling them daily for a few weeks, and sending them a letter from a lawyer, they finally shipped me the new laptop. Bought myself a pair of active switching 3D glasses and hand fun with that for about an hour before finally enjoying my laptop like I intended to.
No need to be a snarky asshole. I’m just relating our experience at work. The link seems to focus on playing video games on the device, not office apps and browsing.
Semi-related, I have an HP envy x360 with 4500u (same one as the laptop posted) and I have to say, the way HP applies BIOS updates is reckless at best.
The battery had died and when I first plugged it in, it immediately powered up, and started installing a BIOS update. If someone tripped on the power cord, or had a power outage, it would brick the laptop. I guess it downloaded the update the last time it was powered on (months ago).
They should put a minimum battery % (could be as low as 10% I imagine), but it seems very likely to me if someone has just plugged in their laptop, there is a strong chance it may get unplugged as well.
I only use this laptop to tune my AEM ECU on my car, and it rarely gets used, but I bet I am not the only one who has a HP laptop that isn't used every week.
I think they need minimum estimated battery time rather than battery %, since old batteries that have very little capacity remaining could still brick with a high % remaining.
Or, like most laptops, just require power cable + some level of battery to install something so critical.
The real real Copy of final_2024_last solution is, of course, to make the BIOS chip twice as big as it needs to be, and flash the other half, then atomically change which is selected.
This is still not something you can take for granted, even on a mid to high range desktop motherboard. Flashback is still something you must pay extra for, and a secondary BIOS is the same. Laptops are even further behind!
This is news to me. I knew they bricked your printer if a non-HP cartridge was found. Now they brick your computer too? I hope they don't venture in the pacemaker market any soon. Then HP may brick consumers themselves.
This is worth filing a Computer Fraud and Abuse case. This clearly "exceeds authorized access". HP can argue in court that they are entitled to brick your laptop. That would probably not impress a jury or judge.
curios honestly, why not and what do you think that actually merits filling a case? I am genuinely interested on hearing the mental gymnastics you do in order to hate consumers
The access was intentional. The botch was presumably an error, but that doesn't matter. What matters is the "authorization" issue. Was HP authorized to access the computer? Probably. Were they authorized to damage the computer? No. There's room for legal argument.
CFAA: intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, causes damage and loss.
The point is that fighting this is a lose-lose for HP. Either HP has to argue in court that they have a contractual right to brick your computer, or they have to make you happy enough to drop the case.
Visualize the press coverage of HP arguing on the record that they have the right to brick your computer.
Yes - the CFAA as a criminal issue requires "mens rea", the intention to commit a crime. Very few laws (such as involuntary manslaughter) have exceptions to this.
If you break someone's shit by accident, they can still sue you, and people should probably sue HP, but you can't try to have a prosecutor bring them to a criminal trial under the CFAA.
No, but it usually makes it civil liability and not criminal liability. For the most part (there are exceptions), you can't accidentally commit a crime.
Someone in that thread talks about the numbers of devices potentially affected versus the few complaints.
I’m not sure “potentially millions” is right; I suspect individual HP models (of which there are many) maybe sell in the tens or at most low hundreds of thousands.
But I fear the reason why there are so few complaints is easy: it’s a three-year-old HP laptop model so they are mostly already in the bin.
For some reason I could never ever trust HP, their products never seem high quality and given the brand culture (especially about printers and cartgridges) I'm not even remotely surprised.
This same kind of thing happened to a family member several years ago on his Dell Inspiron 3650 minitower. Dell’s automatic updates installed a BIOS update (3.9.0) that bricked the computer. It would just power off and on automatically forever, no way to even access the BIOS. A bunch of other people online ran into the exact same problem.
I ended up reflashing the 3.9.0 BIOS to the flash chip and it fixed it [1]. Later on, people discovered that changing an Intel ME-related jumper on the motherboard also fixed it - a much easier fix.
It seems crazy to me that manufacturers include BIOS updates as part of automatic updates, especially for out-of-warranty systems.
Seems this has (now is) been the norm. HP recently acquired gaming peripheral company HyperX. I purchased a HyperX Cloud III headset on recommendation. While it hasn't bricked, apparently a month or so prior to now HP bricked all of those headphones for a month with no update.
Same, bought 2 Hyper X Cloud Orbit-S Gaming (one for me and my partner), and they both broke within 2 years. If you look on the Amazon reviews and sort by date you will see everyone is having this problem, they break in the exact same place after about 2 years.
The comments in this thread make me happy I live in a country with good consumer law. Who cares how long the "warranty" is? If you bricked my laptop, you'll fix it or give me a new one, simple as that.
In the 90s I owned several HP products including pcs, laptops and printers. First the printer ink cartridges were either half full or just trash, then Toshiba simply put out a better laptop. (hated to see the Toshiba laptop go away, they were easy to get into for upgrades.)
Now I'm using a HP laptop with an i7 CPU and it's actually a nice machine. I'll see how much I like it when I need to open it up.
I switched jobs to a small startup, and could choose the laptop model for the first time
Bought the latest generation HP Elitebook G11 to try something else than Lenovo that had crappy trackpads due to the nibble
It has been a disaster in terms of software/BIOS:
* The mic cut off my voice when I was speaking all the time
* The CPU clocked down to ~300 MHz and got stuck there
* External display would not work if I disconnected, came back 30-60 min later, and reconnected. Had to hibernate inbetween
* The display would suddenly dim and be impossible to change
I think all these issues resolved itself with some firmware update released last week, and today I discovered there's an "HP Audio Control" app that by default is set to "conference mode" and "AI noise reduction"
Now I only need to get the built-in 5G modem to work
Would have gotten a Microsoft Surface model, but the selection is very slim in Norway
Carly Fiorina successfully and completely dismantled "The HP Way" which was the root of Silicon Valley. After her, HP was nothing but a carcass and filled with opportunistic people that destroyed the company. HP looks at their customers like an enemy.
Anyone who buys anything HP is intentionally making their lives miserable and they deserve it for not doing a modicum of research to avoid them.
>dismantled "The HP Way" which was the root of Silicon Valley.
The "real" HP still lives on as its spinoffs that do "real" engineering: HPE servers, Agilent oscilloscopes, Broadcom optical sensors, Philips heartrate monitors.
The consumer facing brand of HP (printers, laptops, etc) is bottom of the barrel Chinesium, same as Philips.
The mainboard on my Framework died, randomly. They replaced it, (almost) no questions asked. Shipped me a replacement, and I was able to replace it myself in fifteen minutes.
Speak with your dollars. Even though I was unhappy that the device was broken, my next laptop will probably be a framework. Although I would love if they started selling replacement chassis, mine is bent (that was my own fault).
Which part of your chassis is bent? They sell both top[0] and bottom[1] cover portions, as well as the input cover[2], which I think covers all the chassis
Race to the bottom. No reputation of quality => can’t raise price => cutting costs beyond the red line => mishaps => no reputation of quality => …
Cf Apple who charge an arm and a leg for anything above the base config (which admittedly is tight but still usable) because people trust them to not pull such dumb moves.
They really do for extras. The base config is IMHO on the contrary best price/experience ratio available on the market even including the subpar macOS.
I've worked with many engineers from HP. They were NOT incompetent. What they did describe though was a culture of firefighting and micromanagement complaining there was no opportunity to drive systemic improvement.
Lack of adequate testing probably due to rushed schedules, insufficient infrastructure, and perhaps poor release practices because management celebrates firefighting as it's the easiest way to show "business impact."
You can even wipe the entire SSD on a mac and STILL you have the ability to reinstall macOS without putting in any disc or USB stick. It's just always there waiting
This is almost correct. For the new Apple silicon machines you do need a second working Apple computer and cable in order to do a DFU if you completely wipe the SSD.
You can also waltz into an Apple store to have it done if you don’t have access to any other machines.
Does HP have QA anymore? I haven't seen or heard from a QA person in years. From what I can tell nobody has QA anymore. I think it was a rapture situation. If anyone was worthy of salvation it was QA.
I really liked my old 2013-era HP Elitebook, but honestly every other HP laptop I've come into contact with (and I used to see a lot at the laptop repair shop I worked at) has just sucked.
Man you aren't kidding. It has been going on for a long time now. I work on vintage computers for "fun" and recently got a couple of those HP "bubble" systems from the 90s. What a pain in the arse to disassemble. They have to make the PC so convoluted to take apart and have multiple parts where a normal PC just has one. (Ex. Front panel is multiple pieces of brittle plastic, extra metal pieces that are overkill and are sharp so you always cut yourself).
I have a stack of P4 and Core 2 era machines that just have some random failure and its almost not worth my time anymore to fix them other than curiosity. P4 and core2 are basically worthless but HP P4 and Core2 systems? No one wants that trash.
> P4 and core2 are basically worthless but HP P4 and Core2 systems? No one wants that trash.
Nobody wants post-Fiorina HP computers. But I recently sold several Core 2 IBM/Lenovo laptops, for significant money, because people love those. Last night, I ordered a part to polish up the final one on hand, to sell for $200+.
>But I recently sold several Core 2 IBM/Lenovo laptops, for significant money, because people love those.
What do people do with them? Those chips came out in 2006. Loading a modern JS heavy webpage will kneel a Core 2 Duo laptop chip.
Maybe it's tinkerers and businesses who buy them, not people. Business who depend on keeping older machinery going in workshops and what not.
If you're an average joe in need of a laptop at home for web & stuff, for 200+ USD used you can get much more modern machines for home users that will be better at running modern web content than core 2 duo machines.
I was using Core 2 Duo just fine as daily drivers with Linux until a year ago. I upgraded for different reasons.
With 8GB RAM, they will run 3 separate Web browsers at once, still using only a minority of the RAM, and are just fine with pretty much any Web site.
(Maybe it helped to be using uBlock Origin, which reduces both page load bulk, and also eliminates some very invasive behavioral spying that can be resource-heavy.)
One of the ~10 Core 2 ThinkPads I recently I sold went to a business involved with used science lab equipment. The rest of the sales seemed to be for probably personal use.
>I was using Core 2 Duo just fine as daily drivers
Eh, everyone has a different subjective definition of what "just fine" means.
In case of an emergency I guess could make do for a little while with one, but I came back once to my old Core 2 Quad system out of nostalgia and while it does works cand can do things, compared to my newish Ryzen laptop the difference when browsing the web and multitasking is absolutely night and day, but the day is on Pluto.
Once you get used to a modern fast machine with 8 cores at 5GHz and NVME ssd, I just could never imagine going back to a core 2 duo and spinning rust machine today, Linux or not. The difference is staggering.
>With 8GB RAM
That definitely makes a difference, but it's a bit disingenuous, since stuff like 8GB RAM or SSDs were not the standard for Core 2 Duo machines though. Most of those machines you'll find in the wild tend to have more like 1-4GB RAM and spinning rust. That's really tough to daily drive.
>What software you run, and how you use it, are also big factors.
The Web is the same for everyone. So is stuff like browsers and webapps like Teams, G-Suite, Office 365, Youtube, Spotify, Facebook, flight bookign sites, etc. The UX difference between those pages/apps running on a core 2 duo and a modern machine is stratosferic. Even bigger when you have same other stuff in the background like a torrent downloader, dropbox client, messengers, etc.
You are free to say it doesn't bother you, but the difference is definitely there and palpable for everyone. Of course, if your core 2 duo laptop is the Ship of Theseus with everything on it maxxed out and only the chip being the old original part, sure I can believe the difference is smaller, but like I said, that's not really representative for most core 2 due systems of their era which definitely show their age today.
Just a guess but they may be for the truly paranoid as they are the last from Intel without the ME black-box, and with a lean Linux (e.g. Void, or my new beau Chimera-Linux) probably work better than you’d think.
(and Now I’m thinking of digging out my old MacBook Pro 2,2 to see what’s what)
I know, I also use lean LInxues, but JS heavy websites and productivity apps will still be slower compared to modern machines, no matter what Linux distro you use, especially if you multitask a lot.
Void Linux won't give your machine more GHz or TFLOPs or turn your HDD into a NVME, it'll just reduce the RAM and storage footprint compare to more feature rich distros, but your CPU performance in all tasks will stay the same.
My old Macbook, has 2x2.2 GHz 64-bit procs and one of the OG Intel SSDs to replace the HDD – given it’s only sata3 but I have a suspicion it’s still good.
I think I actually will revive it this weekend just to see for myself, all else fails it has a great big matte screen and excellent keyboard I could use for distraction free writing.
Well thats more of an special exception because people want those nice keyboards. I think there are some projects to replace the PCB of the older T60 and T400 models with modern motherboards.
Also whenever I see Fiorina partner with someone in politics that person loses credibility in my eyes. Like they clearly don't care at all about track record.
> extra metal pieces that are overkill and are sharp so you always cut yourself
This is memory I have as well, but not specific to Dell. It was the least favorite part of building/updating any PC from back then. I don't remember one time of not coming away with some sort of scrape or cut.
Yeah it was common in 90s PCs. Dell had those silly metal "bars" you had to remove. Like did anyone care if the case would stay intact if you dropped it?
But HP just had so much extra redundant metal that you'd have to touch to disassemble the pc so it was just so much more common(in my opinion).
A former HP employee told me that a creating named subdomain required a VP-level signoff, while those "license plate" style subdomains could be provisioned by almost anybody via a self-service tool. So if there isn't a real reason for a nice URL, people tend to create license plate subdomains.
For some reason HP has always had those god awful links that look like the average phishing scam link. I think their docs and even the main website used to have a similar URL pattern at some point.
Don’t they usually try at least to have a domain that sorta looks like the original? It’s not like they use phishing.bigbank.abc.xyz - the domain isn’t supposed to look suspicuous
To be clear, HPE (HP Enterprise) which sells servers and HP Inc. which sells PCs and printers are polar opposites despite their common origin and nearly identical names.
Yes, unless you are under warranty or there is a critical patch release.
This habit emerged since the 'strategic' merge with Micro Focus. I think they are, in fact, in charge with all software side of HPE.
Yes, and also they are not HP servers, they are HPE. HP split off the server division into HPE Hewlett Packard Enterprise some years ago. I have a very high regard for HPE products, not so much for HP products...
20 years ago when I worked in retail selling computers, we had moderately high end HP laptop at a great sale price with an extra RAM slot that many customers opted to get a stick for.
We started getting returns immediately and once we started inspecting the laptops, we saw that the extra DIMM slot didn't even have any lines connecting it on the motherboard.
HP tried to insist that they wouldn't credit us for the returned defective computers without us signing an NDA, which we refused but still shipped back all the units from our entire chain of retail stores. This was many thousands of units and they probably lost an assload on the returns.
Their products have been garbage for a long, long time.