Omen 16.1 Gaming Laptop - Cannot update BIOS, touchpad totally unresponsive

[AKarp]

Hello,

I've had this laptop for a bit over a year now (so out of warranty, of course). I took it back to Harvey Norman not long after purchase, due to serious lag / dropping out of the touchpad. They refused to refund, saying they had a right to repair it. The guy there proceeded to mock me for not updating the BIOS (why should I have known about that? I always did all my updates through the automatic updates) and had it "repaired". The touchpad still played up on occasion, then the entire device all-but bricked (touchpad totally wiped out, keyboard lagging to the point of being totally unusable) following an driver update for a game on Steam. I reset it to factory defaults. Which "worked", save the touchpad has never worked since, despite all attempts at driver re-installations and such. (It also had the same issue once again due to a game update, I think I've reset it three times at this point, not including the times before I tried to return it).

Anyways. Last week I decided I'd try to get to the bottom of it. According to my HP assistant, the BIOS is out-of-date. However, it wouldn't install due to "not enough space" on the drive, despite having plenty of space. So today I got hold of a USB. But then the hardware diagnostics UEFI was out-of-date. Updated that. New version *also* doesn't have the option to boot from a USB. Just a bunch of self-diagnostic tools.

So now I'm stuck. I have no idea how to install the new BIOS if it won't do it via the HP assistant due to "not enough space" or via USB because the newest hardware diagnostics UEFI has no option for it.

Assistance appreciated, but please note I have no idea what I'm doing other than trying to read and follow instructions online. It's all very frustrating. This is the single most expensive and useless piece of technology I have ever purchased, and I am most certainly never going anywhere near a HP product again after this one. My 8 year old ASUS RoG laptop is still out performing this darn thing at times (*and* it has a disk drive *and* proper storage space like a real computer ought to!) It's pretty depressing how backwards things seem to have gone.