Hacker News Reader

Comment by _trampeltier | Hacker News Reader

On work, I never had so much trouble, like with my HP ZBook and Win10. It had already once a complete reset, but still, I have a lot of trouble. Special since the new BIOS update about a month ago, it crashes once or twice a day again.

In theorie Win10 looks nice. I tryed to upgrade one of my notebooks at home from Win7 to Win10. Privacy is one thing, but CandyCrush and things like that, was a totaly show stopper for me. I mean, I even have the Pro licences, but so much bloat .. So since the, I'm Linux only at home. I will never upgrade to Win 10.

View on HN

HP's drivers are the worst I came across. We got HP Elitebook notebooks at work a few years ago and replaced them with Lenovo and Dell because the HPs kept crashing and slowing down over time. Their "utility" software like HP Sure Click slowed the whole system down and turned into nagware. There were at least 3 HP programs hogging the tray area and made discovery of my actually wanted tray icons hard. On top of that the fans just didn't spin down, even after a reinstall, so I were forced to work with constant fan noise in the background.

I never felt so miserable using a notebook before and dreaded each day I had to use it.

Secret to a (semi)happy life with HP - Identify the hardware and install drivers directly from the manufacturer (or any other company, like Lenovo heh) and do not install any HP software, ever.

On work I have no rights to do that. There are hundrets of ZBooks in the company and every one has different troubles with it. Is it to much to ask it has just to run troublefree. We all just wanna use it. It just has to work, like a car or whatever. computers are just tools to make our life more easy. I'm to old to spend more time with my computer on work just for fun. My time on work cost money.

Oof, yeah, without a proper configuration, they can be a pain in the ass. Out of the box, brand new, they overheat already. HP software is absolute trash.

I literally use drivers from Lenovo because the ones HP provides are like 5 years old and they don't plan on updating them.

Updating the BIOS is like playing Russian roulette, they seem to introduce more bugs than they fix.

But the hardware itself is nice, I've been using HP workstations for more than a decade. Quality has gone down somewhat (less metal, more plastic, less durable compared to early Elitebooks imo), but they're still nice machines.

Yes, HP seems really like worse machines. I just set the max. CPU to 80% because of the costant fan noise. He is quiet now but also slower (of course). Also just the sound driver is around 500MB in RAM, serious? Lucky me I have 32GB. Since I work in a large company, I have nothing to say about the computer brand. At home I'm a happy Fujitsu user since many years.

Notebookfancontrol works with HP ZBooks G1-G2 (same controller as the Elitebook 8760w), you can use that. But it won't fix their terrible cooling system.

ZBook 15 here (2014) and no such problems. I always used it with Ubuntu so they seem related to Windows. Strange because one expects that HP optimize their hw and sw for Windows.

Windows 10 has a lot of issues on the ZBook G1/G2. It's even worse when installed under UEFI, so it could be HP's shoddy firmware. Windows 7 is rock stable, though.

I have a ZBook 15 G3, from 2016, I think. No stability issues at all (running Windows 10, but the cooling is crap, which in turn means the fan noise is really annoying.

I worked IT at a newspaper a few years back and we instituted a strict "never HP" (I believe we had one HP printer that got grandfathered in) policy, so strict in fact that when we were looking to upgrade our fleet of laptops the company president (in his defense he was trying to be helpful) walked into our office area and told my manager he found a great deal on a palette of HP laptops. My manager, myself, and two co-workers all spontanously shouted "No!" in such perfect unison we considered forming an acapella group just by channeling our hatred of HP. The president backed out the door quietly and avoided eye contact with us for the rest of the day.

Candy Crush et al. is uninstallable with three clicks. And that’s it, slightly annoying, but it won’t slow down your machine or anything.

It's not as straightforward when you're trying to create a master image for your corporate machines, though. Several steps [1] are required to properly remove it from all users on the machine after it is silently auto-installed or auto-updated, and this requires trawling through the error log to find the root cause [2].

1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-sg/troubleshoot/windows-client...

2: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/2c...

Install 0 clicks, uninstall 3 clicks plus slight annoyance. Multiply by whatever autoinstall Windows Store crap Microsoft is pushing at any given time.

I'm to old, to tired of computers to search for such things. Computers are just a tool. MS say 'you can't do it' I say I don't use it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com