Z-Book Studio G5 Unexpected BIOS Upgrade

[Z-User]

I just purchased a used Z-Book Studio G5 which appears to have been an off lease business system. On Friday I left the computer on over night and the next morning I noticed it was in the process of updating the BIOS. I took no action to initiate this action and I'd like to understand why it did so.

When I received the laptop there was no OS installed so I installed a fresh copy of Window 10 Professional 64-bit. Since a BIOS upgrade is OS independent I don't feel it has anything to do with Windows.

In the BIOS setup Main menu I see an option for "Update System BIOS". When I select this option I see that the installation date of the current BIOS is indeed yesterday, confirming what I observed yesterday morning. I also see two options which could explain what I observed:

"Native OS Firmware Update Service" which is checked and "Allow BIOS Updates Using a Network" which is unchecked. For the latter there is an option to configure network settings (presumably so the BIOS knows how to contact the HP update servers). Is the "Native OS Firmware Update Service" the source of the automatic update? This would make sense as it would be the only way I can think that the laptop knew how to join my wireless access point and connect to the Internet.

One of the reasons I am asking is modern systems have remote management capability and I want to ensure this isn't still under management of the organization that previously had the system. This seems unlikely because, as mentioned earlier, I wouldn't know how the system would be able to perform an out of band connection to the Internet in order for remote management to function.

Thoughts?

[Z-User · Accepted solution]

After researching the "Native OS Firmware Update Service" BIOS setting I have determined that the BIOS update was based on an update through the Windows Update Service as described in the following HP document:

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c06696094

A review of the System event log within Windows I see an entry where the BIOS was updated on the day and time that I observed the update. The BIOS version noted in the event log entry matches the BIOS that is currently installed.

With this I consider this the answer to what I observed and it looks as if HP is moving in this direction for many, if not all, of their laptop products.