Removal of drivers for legacy systems from Support website

[Sean_OH]

For several years, I've relied on the HP Support website to locate drivers for my legacy system, specifically the Soundmax driver for the HP DC 7900 CMT. On several occasions, I've had to manually reinstall the legacy HP sound driver after OS upgrades or reinstalls, thanks to Windows 10 having a broken replacement sound driver in the Windows driver repository. The Windows 7 one works perfectly fine with Windows 10 1903.

Despite having a perfectly functional driver, HP appears to have recently removed all legacy support for these older systems. I was lucky enough to find the driver elsewhere, but I'd like to pass along how  petty and unsupportive of customers this is. The PC may be old and not worth much, but there's no reason to remove working drivers unless you're that hard up for saving on website storage, which you likely aren't. Put the drivers back and send whoever made this stupid decision back to college for a class on prioritizing customer service.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

I have no idea what you are referring to.

All of the XP, Vista and W7 drivers are on the dc7900 support page.

You have to select the operating system from the drop down menu.

Detected operating system: Windows 7 (64-bit) Choose a different OS

The Soundmax driver for W7 is right where it always was...

https://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp45501-46000/sp45615.exe

[Sean_OH]

I was able to find the driver using your link. The site has changed from when I used it last. The site now presents a default that apparently doesn't correspond to any OS, therefore the default answer is no drivers are available, but you can select the OS and then click on a link to display all of the available drivers.

I'd rephrase my comment to say this site style is confusing to use, but you have answered my question about the driver.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

HP seems to enjoy revamping the support site every now and then, to test our ability to figure out how the new site design works.

This change just happened in the last month or so.

You will only get the 'We were unable to find drivers for your product' message if HP has no W10 drivers for your PC (which they don't for the dc7900 model series).

If you had a PC that has support for W10, you would have gotten a green button to automatically scan your PC for drivers, or an option to click and expand an all drivers link.

I'm glad you discovered that the W7 Soundmax driver works better in W10 than the generic audio driver that W10 installs.

The dc7800 uses the same audio driver as the dc7900.