Shocking revelation by HP about their PCs and WIn10 / Probook 450 G2 wi-fi driver 18.33.14.3

[stephen_ford]

I have just had a very revealing (and to me - shocking remote session with HP support). A bit of a revelation.

I reported that one of the HP Wi-Fi drivers is faulty; that my PC is running well enough, and all I wanted to do was report the fault.  

After to-ing and fro-ing for an hour his verdict was that the PC is not confirmed to be compatible with Win10. I made the point that none of the information from HP, including messages from software installers, warn of this situation. He advised that I should have read this https://support.hp.com/sg-en/document/c04355112#AbT11 

There is no way I would have reasonably understood from the above, that Win10 was not supported on my laptop. It's a miserable cop-out in my estimation.

The irony is that now, I am more or less satisfied with the behaviour of the laptop. It's been a very difficult journey to this point though.

I have had trouble with this laptop for five years, and only just recently have I managed to stabilise it by setting a group policy to prevent the wi-fi driver from being updated.

It arrived in 2015 with Win7, an HDD and a single band Wi-Fi adapter. In later years I fitted a SSD and a dual band wi-fi adapter. And then came the "biggy" - Win10 (with the missing printer drivers - remember that fiasco??)

Driver18.33.14.3 seems to have a bug that causes a very fragile connection and the creation of large temp files in the usr/temp folder. It needed a Group Policy to prevent updates to the Wi-Fi driver. Win Update kept reinstalling the one that fails on my laptop. Once I discovered the Group Policy setting, the older driver (17.15.0.5) remains in place and Wi-Fi is fine.

It also had a problem with sleep mode. If I press the power button when it's on, and then wake it up, it will fall asleep as and when it feels like it. But with the Wi-Fi issue and other problems from various Windows updates along the way, it's taken me all this time to realise I must only use the power button to switch on.

At the very least, my expectation is that HP installers should give a warning "Your PC is not compatible with Win10. HP do not offer support."  - or whatever.

What do you think?

[Dragon-Fur]

@stephen_ford 

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@stephen_ford wrote:

<Comments removed> See original post ...

What do you think?

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I am sorry you are disappointed.

It is good that you have solved the issues in your system.

Sometimes reporting what you view as a perfectly legitimate fault, issue, or problem just doesn't go as you hope.

This "Windows 10 - Tested Systems List" document has been around for quite awhile - the content is still kept updated.

HP products tested with Windows 10 

True -

Sometimes the onus is on the consumer to keep track of support on his / her / their device, including what, when, how, if .

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[stephen_ford]

Thank you for your comments. I am wiser now, but not as a result of help from HP; but rather from recognising my own mistake - I fell into a hole and I had to dig myself out.

It's true that we all have to look after ourselves. We are all responsible for our wellbeing. However, taken to it's ultimate, that would mean a child, once born would be left to look after itself. That is a ridiculous scenario that no right-minded parent would entertain for obvious reasons - the risk of failure is too high. We all need a helping hand. We go through this life with the notion that there are some people we look after - our kids, parents and friends becasue we can. But there are limits to our resources so we limit what we do. In some cases, like medics, they look after strangers. And companies look after their customers becasue it makes financial sense.

Care takes many forms - dressing wounds, consoling, and advising to help prevent someone falling into a hole.

When we warn someone of an impending danger we can leave a warning note in a cupboard and hope they open it and see the warning. Or we can tell them - "just watch out for this situation which is developing..." - almost like a weather forecast.

If we leave the warning note in a cupboard, of course there is the risk that it won't be seen. Once a person has fallen into a hole it's not very helpful to say "Well you should have looked in the cupboard where there is a warning note." Most people I would suggest would say that is poor practise and not evidence of taking any care.

Yes, had I understood the implications of the information in the specification document I could have reviewed it, but in truth I would not have realised it meant "and this PC is therefore likely to be incompatible with other operating systems". But if HP had presented a warning, well that would have been really useful. How did I perform? I was naïve but am now wiser. How did HP perform? They didn't help and have not changed as far as I can see...