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Comment by alias_neo | Hacker News Reader

As a software engineer myself, I would say yes, but I'm biased. I know no code is released perfect.

Then for something high performance like an NVM.e SSD, you could potentially gain a lot of performance, or lose it, depending on the manufacturer's goals for stability vs speed.

After a couple of decades of updating firmware on things whenever possible (including my car which had me leave the engine running sitting in the car with the window down for 2 hours in the winter), I'm yet to have a real issue.

That said, I also have the tools and skills to dump flash chips and would suggest doing that to anyone before an update of certain devices, or, you know, just don't do it, as you suggest.

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> After a couple of decades of updating firmware on things whenever possible, I'm yet to have a real issue.

I used to be in the same boat, up until a few weeks ago when I updated the BIOS on my new work laptop. It's been a shitshow ever since: it takes around one minute to POST, the webcam isn't detected anymore, it doesn't go to sleep.

And the best part? "Because this update contains security features, it cannot be rolled back".

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edit to name and shame: HP EliteBook 845 G8

Enable quick boot

Haven't seen any "quick" boot. There's a "fast" one, though, but toggling it doesn't do anything in this case.

I have found that on my machines, they provide a means to disable the security check and allow the downgrade anyway.

This is a real issue though, there is the risk of failure during the procedure, less so than it once was, but then the risk that the update actually performs worse than the previous version.

The latter I don't know how we resolve.

> I have found that on my machines, they provide a means to disable the security check and allow the downgrade anyway.

I was usually able to this, and my other HP machines propose to do a BIOS downgrade. But in this particular case I haven't managed to do a rollback, even with a "BIOS recovery", whatever that is.

That's unfortunate. Does your company buy a lot of these?

Perhaps they can get in touch with your supplier to pass a complaint about the poor update so they might be able to pass it on to their devs and hopefully fix the issue?

We only buy HP PCs, but we don't have a relationship with them (we go through a middleman). And also, this particular model is not common for us, I chose it for the Zen 3 CPU and upgradability. The usual PCs are the basic Intel i5 du jour, so I can't compare notes with other people. I'm also pretty much the only one doing firmware upgrades with any regularity.

The middleman would be your supplier in this case. It's possible they have enough of a relationship with HP to escalate the issue with them.

I would try have your org reach out to the middleman and see what they can do, suppliers, resellers and partners etc can be quite helpful in encouraging manufacturers to pay attention.

Firmware updates often push new "business opportunities" for the manufacturer... Eg. HP printers that suddenly start forcing you to buy new cartridges after an automatic firmware update, since they realise that by forcing you to buy new cartridges before they're really empty, you'll buy more.

While this can be an issue, it's an obvious one and I'd say a good reason to avoid manufacturers and devices that enable such anti-user behaviour.

Generally speaking though, outside of printer ink, which I've always considered to be a racket, this sort of thing is perhaps less of an issue.

That's not to say people like Sonos and others haven't used firmware updates to brick otherwise perfectly functional devices in order to force consumers to "upgrade" before now.

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