Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 51 posts

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#31

Post by theandrewbailey »

tokai wrote: post #12

Rich coming from HP. They have trailed blazed how blatant planned obsolescence can be done in printers, and though its not hard data I have seen plenty HP laptops just burn themselves out after some years of use. They can definitely build better products without user data, just stop working so hard on making them crap.

I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. HP laptops constitute about 90% of the BIOS passworded/locked systems we get. We can't do anything with a laptop that we can't adjust the boot order or disable secure boot on, and the value of completely disassembling, de-soldering, and flashing the BIOS chip of an EliteBook that could go for $200 or less is dubious. (We've tried everything short of that.) Maybe I can try to build a lot from them and sell to a large repair shop.

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#32

Post by quesera »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #31
tokai wrote: post #12

Rich coming from HP. They have trailed blazed how blatant planned obsolescence can be done in printers, and though its not hard data I have seen plenty HP laptops just burn themselves out after some years of use. They can definitely build better products without user data, just stop working so hard on making them crap.

I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. HP laptops constitute about 90% of the BIOS passworded/locked systems we get. We can't do anything with a laptop that we can't adjust the boot order or disable secure boot on, and the value of completely disassembling, de-soldering, and flashing the BIOS chip of an EliteBook that could go for $200 or less is dubious. (We've tried everything short of that.…

Can you flash the PROM with just a clip on connector? (thereby avoiding desolder and most disassembly)

I've done this successfully on HP Chromeboxes, but have not tried their other devices.

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#35

Post by greatgib »

Woah, based on the title I didn't expect to read one of the most elaborate corporate bullshit I have seen coming from HP.

Basically, they just want to add constant and invasive useless telemetry, in the crappiest way possible to ensure easy access for them, unexpected hardware bugs and security breach as much as possible. Green washing again pretending that it has any impact on the environment.

For no added value for the user. That sucks highly.

What would be good for the user and ecologically is too ensure that every part is easily replaceable and user serviceable. Also reduce the useless crapware in the background consuming energy and reducing performance. But I guess it does not give you $$ worth of user telemetry data.

For reselling, everything has already enough info at sale time, as is, without keeping a daily log: - age of the computer - SSD health data - battery health data - model of all components that would give you info about their quality on the long run - you can easily check the state of the casing, screen, keyboard, connectors. - if it was easy to open, you can see the inside state, fan state.

For the rest, anyway there is no telemetry that will tell you if anything will fail based on its past. It just suddenly fail at random time by surprise, like the screen connector being torn. And anyway, again, normally if a component has a problem, like ram, you should be able to easily swap it.

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#36

Post by johnklos »

This seems wrong for several reasons:

* Collecting all sorts of telemetry has never been done for altruistic reasons by large tech companies.

* The value of an HP over an Apple is that the HP are supposed to be upgradable, so will HP start monitoring all the replaced parts of machines, too?

* HP has a multi-decade history of not being able to maintain a single URL for long term. I bet the only URL that hasn't changed from the '90s is "http://www.hp.com/". We're suppoed to believe that HP will maintain a customer facing system for more than a couple of machine lifecycles?

This is just an attempt to exfiltrate all sorts of data.

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#38

Post by jrockway »

tokai wrote: post #12

Rich coming from HP. They have trailed blazed how blatant planned obsolescence can be done in printers, and though its not hard data I have seen plenty HP laptops just burn themselves out after some years of use. They can definitely build better products without user data, just stop working so hard on making them crap.

This must be consumer vs. enterprise. For consumers, they're going to buy the item that is $1 less at the time of purchase, even if it costs them hundreds of dollars over the lifetime of the printer. For enterprises, they have accountants tracking the total cost of ownership, so they aren't going to optimize like this. HP is in both businesses; cheap inkjets for people that want to print stuff at home, cheap laptops for corporations that need to give their employees a Windows laptop with 25 minutes of battery life. I am sure the TCO on the cheap laptops actually saves customers money, at least when Windows is required.

(I have been issued an HP laptop before. They certainly don't spend money on the screen, keyboard, battery life, cooling, or industrial design. You can add your own memory though!)

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#39

Post by theandrewbailey »

quesera wrote: post #32
theandrewbailey wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. HP laptops constitute about 90% of the BIOS passworded/locked systems we get. We can't do anything with a laptop that we can't adjust the boot order or disable secure boot on, and the value of completely disassembling, de-soldering, and flashing the BIOS chip of an EliteBook that could go for $200 or less is dubious. (We've tried everything short of that.…

Can you flash the PROM with just a clip on connector? (thereby avoiding desolder and most disassembly) I've done this successfully on HP Chromeboxes, but have not tried their other devices.

On models that would be worth reselling, it must be de-soldered.

Re: A CarFax for Used PCs: Hewlett Packard wants to give old laptops new life

#40

Post by callbacked »

bogwog wrote: post #6

> We decided that the best way to do this is to integrate the life-cycle records into the firmware layer. By embedding telemetry capabilities directly within the firmware, we ensure that device health and usage data is captured the moment it is collected. This data is stored securely on HP SSD drives, leveraging hardware-based security measures to protect against unauthorized access or manipulation. The laptop doesn'…

No thanks HP, I'll stick with SMART instead.
Post reply on HN