HP Envy 16 hardware bugs

[User9132022]

It seems like the HP Envy 16 has a few hardware / firmware issues which need addressing.

I'm on Ubuntu LTS but a few other distributions have the same issues so I assume this is a hardware issue.

1. The keyboard

First and the most important is a keyboard bug which triggers erratic keyboard behaviour.

Example: When I select multiple lines of text by holding the Shift key + Up/Down arrows the selection exhibits an acceleration effect - where a few lines of text are selected even after I release the keys on the keyboard. Doing this for a bit longer triggers a crash of the atkbd serio driver. I have debug logs but not sure how to attach them here.

This makes work such as text editing very frustrating.

One solution I've found on Ubuntu LTS is to add the following lines to /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="... atkbd.reset=1 atkbd.set=3 i8042.nomux=1 i8042.reset=1 i8042.dumbkbd=1"

and rebuilt with grub-mkconfig

This is not a perfect solution but it works okay.

I'm pretty sure this is due to i8042 being buggy on this laptop.

2. USB-C charging slowdown

It seems like the laptop can actually charge with a 100W USB-C charger. The issue is that its performance slows down significantly while doing so.

Example: I tried doing the quick CPU benchmark available in CPU-Z (a popular freeware software).

When running on battery with no charger plugged in, the benchmark runs fine. Multi-core performance shows a value of around ~5200.

When I plug-in the HP barrel charger (150W) and run the test again it runs fine, around ~5200 again in the benchmark.

When I plug-in only the USB-C charger (100W) the laptop slows down significantly (and Windows starts stuttering). The benchmark only returns a result of about ~800.

This shows that the CPU is throttled significantly when using a USB-C charger. This should not happen normally.

3. HDMI output artefacts

I'm using the HDMI-out to a DELL P2721Q monitor. Some text exhibits artefacts, such as coloured fringes around text or around black borders.

I haven't figured out a way to solve this.

Please let me know how can I address these issues and whether a BIOS update is planned for this machine.

Thanks.