* Never buy an HP.
* For personal use, one should also treat computers as cattle, not pets. Always automatically backup to at least 2 different locations.
HP has some pretty interesting and successful products such as the Life Sciences dispensers for cells and fluids (see https://www.hp.com/us-en/specialty-printing-solutions/life-s...).
Then there are the industrial printing products (https://www.hp.com/us-en/industrial-digital-presses.html) which are rather mind bogglingly fast and capable. Imagine a printer printing to a paper roll 40" wide at hundreds of feet per second, and the printing is paper statements to be cut and sorted for mailing.
People need to be careful they don't overgeneralize too much about HP. Especially if basing opinions on home/small office product lines, which is not all HP does. I'll fully agree that the bad rep due to home/small office products is probably well deserved.
But HP has some pretty interesting and successful products such as the Life Sciences dispensers for cells and fluids (see https://www.hp.com/us-en/specialty-printing-solutions/life-s...).
Then there are the industrial printing products (https://www.hp.com/us-en/industrial-digital-presses.html) which are rather mind bogglingly fast and capable. Imagine a printer printing to a paper roll 40" wide at hundreds of feet per second, and the printing is paper statements to be cut and sorted for mailing.
I'm sure they still have some nice specialized industrial equipment, but their general purpose computers, even on the high end, just aren't what they used to be
I think we've all been frustrated by HP/Dell/Others support. This guy took it to the next level to prove it's not the freaking ram.
Nicely done.
more info https://gamersnexus.net/gn-extras-news/gamersnexus-warranty-...
For those who want to avoid soldering(unavoidable if chip is bad), SOP8 clips are very cheap on ebay.
There are many alternatives to the STM32 dev board used in the article, common ones are raspberry pi's such as the zero w(what I tend to use, requires some config changes), but also SPI to USB adapters for PC. Always read the flash several times to increase the likelihood you got an error free read, and also read it after writing as well.
Having a working setup able to read and write spi flash is very inexpensive and a handy emergency skill to have.
HP bricks customers laptops with faulty automatic BIOS upgrade
Ultra-high end laptop, and I had also paid for and fitted an Intel X25-E, the very first and single-cell ultra high performance SSD. Laptop was 2k euro, drive was another 700 euro.
After a year or two, the fan begins to run loud - that's fine, normal event.
Laptop is sent back under warranty for fan replacement.
Laptop returns with a new motherboard (and as such, the SIM I left in the motherboard was missing).
Windows does NOT like having the motherboard changed underneath it, and was royally confused on boot, and no longer worked correctly.
I explain this to Support, and that it takes a month for a fresh install of Windows to be fully up to speed.
Laptop is sent back again.
Support then sends me an invoice : their solution to having fucked up Windows is to remove my 700 euro X25-E drive and charge me 400 euro to install a new standard Sony spinning-platter drive with a fresh install of Windows on it.
I gave up with Sony, got my laptop back, reinstalled Windows, and never had anything to do with them again.
I still have my (working) HP 11C and HP 15C calculators, from the early 1980's.
But HP was still a decent company, back then.
Now "HP" is a curse word to anyone in tech. It's a damn shame.
Aside from what would be morally right to do I doubt HP is legally compelled to repair it.
I'm guessing that since this was handled under "extended warranty" the rules of your "minimum legal warranty" don't apply since those have already expired. So the rules of the agreement of the "extended warranty" apply. Which as far as I know is basically just a sort of insurance product with it's own agreement. Guess it's a pretty safe bet the terms contain a clause about not allowing modifications to the product in any form.
But life was easier when this stuff was socketed.
Isn't there ground for fraud too, given how support pretended the problem was something totally unrelated?
It's also interesting/impressive how much work the author went through to reinvent the wheel with his own custom microcontroller setup for reading and flashing the EEPROM when there are so many cheap off the shelf solutions available (that can read and program hundreds of times faster than it sounds like his did).
That must have been part of the erosion of the 'HPWay'?
Didn't Gigabyte put that onto their mainboards
https://www.gigabyte.com/Press/News/795
As I recall, they initially introduced this feature due to a virus around the time which would intentionally corrupt BIOSes.
And for all the crap Lenovo laptops are these days; they also have backup BIOS.
Funnily enough, most BIOS updates end with a "self-healing backup progressing" screen nowadays - which makes me wonder: do they overwrite the backup and abuse that mechanism to update the primary bios?
At work, I've used a ProBook, a ZBook, and two EliteBooks, all of which had major issues. Sleep mode never worked on any of them (immediately turning back on again with powercfg /lastwake showing no reason), and my current EliteBook frequently shuts off without warning and then won't turn on for five minutes. The ProBook and one EliteBook failed randomly and needed to be replaced.
The ZBook's workstation CPU overheated even at light usage, making it unbearably slow. Despite IT saying nothing could (and should) be done, I disassembled it and found it was missing thermal paste, or what little there was had hardened into a brittle, useless mess. Reapplying thermal paste about tripled the Cinebench score.
Given all this ridiculousness, I can't imagine how much worse their consumer laptops must be. It's baffling how anyone but the most naive non-tech people still buys from them.
Kind of reminds me of the darkest days of MBPs and their failing keyboards.
My work laptop is doing ok so far with only minor annoyances like needing to reconnect peripherals after waking up the device, but that's it.
Meanwhile I cooked the screen in my Asus personal machine because it assumed that sleep = 100% CPU. Thermal paste was of course cooked as well, so I had to replace it.
All in all I'm glad that Framework expanded into my country recently. It's expensive for what it offers, but half the reason I'll be ordering one is spite.