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Recovery after HP tech support bricked my father's laptop

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Re: Recovery after HP tech support bricked my father's laptop

#21

Post by molticrystal »

> would have been much easier if I'd had a Bus Pirate and SOP8 adapter to clip onto the IC while it was still on the motherboard. >I decide to remove it from the motherboard

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.

Re: Recovery after HP tech support bricked my father's laptop

#22

Post by h3xk1tt3n »

SoftTalker wrote: post #11
mtsr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a shame, their small form-factor business notebooks were once really good. Swappable batteries, worked well with Linux (apart from the touchpad drivers that were just bad for all brands back then).

Their servers always seemed pretty nice back in the day, though I don't have any experience since the HPE spin-off.

When I was a tech I hated their servers so much. It was super easy to damage them when taking them apart, and their raid controllers would cause dban to crash. I did liked the Z400 workstation, though, since it could secure erase drives without having to go to sleep to unfreeze the drives.

Re: Recovery after HP tech support bricked my father's laptop

#23

Post by widerporst »

I'm continually amazed by the (lack of) quality of their laptops and the scenario described really reinforced my opinion of HP.

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.

Re: Recovery after HP tech support bricked my father's laptop

#24

Post by h3xk1tt3n »

molticrystal wrote: post #21

> would have been much easier if I'd had a Bus Pirate and SOP8 adapter to clip onto the IC while it was still on the motherboard. >I decide to remove it from the motherboard 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, re…

I used one of those clips and a raspberry pi to reflash an HP all-in-one that was bricked. I was super proud of it, but then it was destroyed in shipping on its way to the customer.

Re: Recovery after HP tech support bricked my father's laptop

#26

Post by Scoundreller »

molticrystal wrote: post #21

> would have been much easier if I'd had a Bus Pirate and SOP8 adapter to clip onto the IC while it was still on the motherboard. >I decide to remove it from the motherboard 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, re…

I miss rs232 and parallel ports that made stuff like this trivially easy with just diodes and resistors.

Re: Recovery after HP tech support bricked my father's laptop

#27

Post by cricalix »

nick238 wrote: post #17

Technically awesome, but policy-wise, sic Tech Jesus from Gamers Nexus ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pMrssIrKcY ) and/or Louis Rossmann on HP!

Link needs a (2021) I think. Repository says 3 years ago. However, they'd probably still be interested as a pattern of evidence thing.

Re: Recovery after HP tech support bricked my father's laptop

#30

Post by user_7832 »

nolongerthere wrote: post #7

Impressive that he had the tools to flash the chip but it’s absolutely ridiculous that HP and all companies in general can get away with this sort of nonsense, voiding the warranty should be an easy small claims court appeal.

I wonder if there are people who disagree with you, because I can't think of why someone would've flagged your comment.
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