Update bios of "retired product"

[TassuP]

Hi,

I have an old laptop and I installed a 3rd party battery. Charging it has been has been tricky: it only charges if I first let it drain completely empty and then plug in. Then it stops charging and the battery will slowly drain even if plugged in.

I've done some research and I think it's the charging circuit not functioning correctly with the battery.

Some pages suggest a BIOS update might fix this. But I can't find a download for this laptop because it's too old ("retired product")

Where can I manually download the bios update? HP doesn't offer it anymore.

Laptop info:

HP Pavilion x360 - 13-a186no
sn: 5cd5023s8d
pn: l2g04ea#uuw

Originally had Windows 8, but now has Linux Mint

Current bios version: F.12

Linux command "sudo dmidecode | more" tells me the bios is upgradeable.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

I can only find a F.13 BIOS update for your notebook:

Info link:

https://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp70001-70500/sp70323.html 

Exe link:

https://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp70001-70500/sp70323.exe 

The problem is you can only update the BIOS in Windows and according to the release notes on the info link, this BIOS update just provides improved keyboard response.

[TassuP]

Thanks for finding it!

I ran the exe on my wife's laptop and managed to put the updater to a usb stick. Then used that to upgrade my laptop, and everything went smoothly.

I'm not yet sure if it fixed the charging problem, but atleast the charging light is now constantly on. Before the upgrade it was blinking always. So that's a good sign.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

That's great.

I ran it to see if it would allow me to create a bootable USB recovery drive before I replied but W11 blocked the file from opening beyond some report that some file was not supported or something like that.

Yet I can run other HP BIOS updates and create recovery drives with those, so it is only some select files it does that to me on.