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HP bricks ProBook laptops with bad BIOS delivered via automatic updates — many users face black screen after Windows pushes new firmware (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

148 comments fedilink hide all child comments

On May 26, a user on HP's support forums reported that a forced, automatic BIOS update had bricked their HP ProBook 455 G7 into an unusable state. Subsequently, other users have joined the thread to sound off about experiencing the same issue.

This common knowledge regarding BIOS software would, then, seem to make automatic, forced BIOS updates a real issue, even if it weren't breaking anything. Allowing the user to manually install and prepare their systems for a BIOS update is key to preventing issues like this.

At the time of writing, HP has made no official comment on the matter — and since this battery update was forced on laptops originally released in 2020, this issue has also bricked hardware outside of the warranty window, when previously users could simply send in the laptop for a free repair.

Overall, this isn't a very good look for HP, particularly its BIOS update practices. The fragility of BIOS software should have tipped off the powers at be at HP about the lack of foresight in this release model, and now we're seeing it in full force with forced, bugged BIOS updates that kill laptops.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

The article doesn’t say/clarify. Was it some crap HP software that performs driver updates, and it decided to force a bios flash? Or was it windows update itself?

If it was windows itself, holy crap, that’s a serious over reach on Microsoft’s part. Like “this is insanity windows needs to be removed” bad.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Years ago Windows used to not provide drivers. This lead to many users never downloading drivers for their devices. Users ran their devices for years without trackpad, Wifi and GPU drivers etc. The drivers were also scattered all over the internet.

These days vendors can supply Windows with drivers and even Bios updates.

It is very unlikely Microsoft pushed these drivers out themselves. HP likely provided the Bios update..

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

The irony here is that if you've an HP laptop you'll still need to download certain drivers from HP to get things to work at 100%, for instance you may get all the hardware working after running windows update but your special brightness or wtv keys won't work unless you go into HP's website and download a thing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

It was most likely HP, through Windows Update (which handles device-specific driver etc. updates that OEMs are in control of). Microsoft doesn't concern itself with pushing BIOS updates to some random 4-year old HP model