HP Technical support in the UK

[sdes]

Have they suggested replacing the rubber feet? You never know, it might make a difference.

I'm going to guess that the display draws the same power regardless of whether the machine is under load or not.

Surely they should be looking at something to do with the power to CPU or GPU or fans....so something that, erm.....varies its power consumption according to load?

Their lack of any kind of coherent logic or strategy for solving customer issues is utterly perplexing.

Is this "Hemmersbach" by the way? if so, do they write to you as "Dear Sir or Madame", yes, with an e on the end of Madam  and with a logo that looks as if they did a screen grab off an early YouTube video?

[pevsonic]

Nah, it's someone in a call-centre in India that's not allowed to deviate one millimeter from a script, think for themselves or allow me to talk to anyone else apparently. This could *easily* be progressed with a short phone call / email conversation with someone capable in the higher level support / development teams! Yet they're willing to waste what must cost them loads to keep sending engineers to my site to replace stuff. Bonkers.

Actually Ive had two engineers via Hemmersbach - they both seemed to have a reasonable idea of what's what but are at the mercy of what they're instructed to do by HP as well... 

[pevsonic]

An update for anyone reading threads about UK support - over a month later and still no progress at all with a machine that’s unusable for any serious work. Now on the third support agent that’s making the same promises to be the “single point of contact moving forwards”. Nearly been a quarter of a year now and they’ve not even tried to replicate the problem at HP’s end... Astoundingly shocking lack of competence, I certainly will be advising clients to avoid HP machines like the plague in future...

[sdes]

My audio issue was finally resolved thanks to a Audio driver update. Somehow HP had managed to ship a product that wasn't compatible with Microsoft's Skype, not exactly an esoteric or unusual app. 

In the meantime, the USBC dock with Combo cable that I bought with the ZBook workstation also failed, the way the cable is retained, the design of the strain relief,  actually puts a bending force on the cable, and it gave only intermittent connection.

So two out of two products I've ever purchased from HP faulty.

I've just had to accept that the "B&O" audio is just a bit rubbish on a fat Mobile Workstation compared with a slim iPad Pro, but at least it can Skype now.

[pevsonic]

Ah... the "B&O" audio on my ZBook is another one... So, audio is atrocious under Linux, or without HP's specific drivers. The reason why is that the speakers themselves have a very much not-flat frequency response (I did a spectral analysis using white noise on mine) and completely rely on a software solution under windows that equalises it to something vaguely acceptable. Hence without the correct driver, audio is appalling!  

Doesn't bode well about the combo dock - i have one too and was surprised how expensive it was! Was it at the dock end that failed? I might add some DIY additional strain relief on mine to see if I can slow that happening...

[pevsonic]

Also, just to make you laugh, they're sending me another engineer from Hemmsbach again to replace my motherboard a third time. I think they keep hoping that if they do it enough times it might solve the issue. I've tried strongly suggesting that its a design issue most likely needing a BIOS tweak (evidenced by same thing happening on other peoples machines as well) but they don't want to hear it or investigate... *sigh*

[sdes]

Its the strain relief at the dock end on the underside of it, it kinks the cable sideways....see the image. It was effectively DOA, it never worked properly.  I assumed it was a problem with my Dell 5K display, as it needs two display cables from a Mac Pro or the HP dock, but finally realised the poor connection was at the permanently retained end of the USB-C cable. Actually the last place you would expect the bad connection to be, but if you design a strain relief badly and off-axis, of course, its going to damage the cable.

Credit to HP, they did send me a replacement cable, but given it never worked, one has to wonder about the quality control before these products leave the factory.

Sideways kink on coco cable from bad design of strain relief.