Why hp laptops have got so bad reputation??

[aqarwaen]

there are lots people saying dont buy any hp laptops..Why hp laptops have got so bad reputation??how he'll hp did end with so bad reputation?or do they just really bad engineers,who design they laptops??

[rob77]

my HP probook 6460b is going strong after 4 years of heavy usage and carrying it in a backpack everyday... so i don't know what you talking about i do even have a cheapo HP 250 G4 and after 1 year of usage not a single problem..

[rrinker]

 There are HP consumer models and HP business models. Not built to the same standard, it seems.

Everyone at work has an HP business class model,. Mine is at least 5 years old now and has never had an issue. I don't think anyone else has had problems with theirs, except maybe they last so long that they are useless with modern OS and software because they are too slow.

[nctnico]

There are HP consumer models and HP business models. Not built to the same standard, it seems.

That is usually the problem. You better avoid the consumer crap computers because they are a waste of money.

[NiHaoMike]

Even the enterprise HPs are far from immune to problems. In fact, at several companies I worked at in the past, it was fairly common for HP laptops to break down. (Even I was surprised at the pile of broken HPs in the IT office, waiting to be returned under warranty...) As opposed to Dell and Lenovo that almost never seem to break.

The worst, however, was Futurequest. The workstations all had a wiring error that would always cause them to break down in 2-3 years. My dad (who was the IT manager at that company at the time) actually asked me to come along to try to find a fix and that's how I found out about the issue. In the end, every Futurequest was replaced with Dell.

Another good story was when my friend Allie Moore had her HP laptop break down (the PSU, actually) and I managed to fix it by replacing the caps. Impressed as she was, my date with her right afterwards didn't get anywhere...

[JPortici]

may be only valid for consumer grade but hp computers
- are more bloated than average
- even worse, with hp-grade bloat (it is almost impossible to find a driver for a printer that can be downloaded without their web based application so it can choose the best for you. you don't have to do nothing. for all drivers)
- drivers are usually not updated or certified for the following OS so you can't keep your computer updated (you have NO IDEA of the amount of people that came demanding for support for windows 10 update. each and every one of them had problem related to non updated drivers, for which 10 is very picky)
- a lot of crappy plastic. their "gaming laptops" mimic alienware crap to a disturbing level

but, but, but there are also great products: my dad still has a HP laptop that survived for many years, one of their first ultrabook with SSD. still works even if it's infested with nicotine and shit and was software-abused (he was able to fuck up an imac in less than 6 months, due to visures and other crap)

[JPortici]

but 3 forces you to get out of the ecosystem which point seems to lock you in and force to buy a new one

unless you know what to do of course.
then asus is more or less the same crap (my god their launcher in the zenfone allows ads in the lock screen: "for fast charge buy this" "you may want to install that")

[VK3DRB]

HP laptops are designed by the same clowns from Compaq who designed the HW6515, which had an appallingly unreliable hardware and software design. Their mechanical engineers are clueless - they lack common sense. The bundled Tom Tom navigator would tell you to turn AFTER reaching the intersection, and the device would randomly reboot during phone calls. I and a few friends got sucked into buying one of these and we all vowed never to buy anything with the HP logo on it again. For the laptops, they come with a suite of crapware to keep you occupied.

Bad reputations stick. It seems Carly Fiorina ruined HP, a company which was once synonymous with quality and reliability.

[nuno]

I have a ~10year old HP, the cheapest model from the pavilion series (costed me 1070€ at the time, was not expensive), which I think are not business models at all. Works everyday since I bought it and it has actually been always on for more than a year. It has traveled with me (literally) overseas 8 years ago and it even survived a drop from a very high table to the ground at the airport, having lost 1 or 2 tiny bits of plastic in the event. Wireless and CD recording stopped working meanwhile, although I have the strong suspicion that it was due to XP upgrades - I didn't bother trying to fix them, who burns CDs anymore and an USB wireless dongle was damn cheap.
It has 2 things hard to find these days and for a decent price: mate screen (essential for work) and a full aluminum top cover (that's why it survived the fall, having hit the floor directly at a corner; tiny bits of plastic broke, aluminum corner slightly bent but no other damage at all). I guess HP laptops got worse in the last years.

p.s.: And it still has 2h30 of battery life in my normal usage

[joeqsmith]

Funny you bring this up.  Yesterday my laptop died.  It's an HP G72 that I bought new in 2010.   The power supply had failed in it a few years ago and I was able to repair it.  Suspect it's the power supply again.  The charge adapter seems fine.  I doubt I will repair it this time.    This PC was attached to the TV set and was on a UPS.  No bouncing around or temperature cycling but it was turned on basically 24/7.     

I have a very old XP Centrino laptop made by Averitec that I bought new many years ago.  I use it to work on my bikes/cars.  It gets hauled around a lot in the trailer.  Temperature changes a fair amount.  Not to mention the chemicals.   I put a larger drive in in and added more RAM but that's it.  The battery will still run it for at least a half hour.   

[Warhawk]

I guess that is mainly because of "Presario" and "Pavilion" existence.
Practically everything from the business class segment is more or less good. Probooks & Elitebooks including.

[rrinker]

 Could be because all of the HP laptops I've used over the past gew years have gottn complete wipes and fresh OS installations - from Microsoft ISOs, not the HP ones. The one I have now was running Win 7 from a clean install, so the only HP stuff was for device specific drivers like the webcam and fingerprint reader. I did a clean Win 7 install when I put an SSD in it. I was outgrowing the SSD so I put a 500GB model in, and rather than duplicate the existing one, I put on a clean copy of Win 8.1. Which subsequently got the free Win 10 upgrade. None of HP's software is installed.

 A few years ago, GF needed a laptop so I bought a cheap ($279) Compaq one. Before I got done cleaning out the bloatware and installing useful stuff, it died. I opened it up and found the heat pipe was not secured to the CPU, so I cleaned off both mating pieces with alcohol and applied some good quality thermal paste and put it back together. 6 years later it still works fine. It came with only 2 or 3GB RAM, so I expanded that, and I uninstalled all of the useless crap, and considering it's a basic Celeron CPU and probably the slowest spinny hard disk you can get, it works reasonably well. I guess they should sell those cheap ones as "some assembly may be required".

 I don't think I'd touch Dell servers these days - 2 different clients, one bought 4, the other bought 10 - and both had a 50% failure rate out of the box. One was memory, except it was the MB, not the memory sticks, and the other I forget but it also required MB replacements. That's pretty poor quality control, considering in both cases this wasn't like they worked for a few days or weeks and then died - they didn't boot, fresh out of the box. Way back before HP bought Compaq, I was in Compaq's Houston and Atlanta facilities multiple times for various training. Particularly in the plant in Houston, they had tons of specializes test cells, 100% testing on all units. The manufacturing floor was incredible, and the campus itself was way ahead of its time when it came to coexisting with nature - most building to building interconnects were raised so as to allow a continuous grassland from one side of the property to the other so as not to disturb a deer species that used that land for yearly migration. Plus the walkways were all glasses in, so you could get quite up close with the wildlife. Plus they had all sorts of fancy lighting controls and geothermal AC.

[rollatorwieltje]

In the Core 2 Duo era there were some shitty Elitebook models that would completely die out of nowhere, typically just after 3 years. The only visible thing was the power led faintly flickering. I haven't seen any issues with the ones we had after those.

The low end consumer stuff is just like any other brand, just typical cheap construction and software bloat.

I have bought an Envy 14 once as well, nice machine except for the absolutely garbage display.

[VK3DRB]

Bad reputations stick. It seems Carly Fiorina ruined HP, a company which was once synonymous with quality and reliability.

She received $100M compensation by firing herself .

This bloke makes Carly look like Mother Theresa...

Louis B. Gerstner revoked $40K of my retirement savings when he sold me and hundreds of other IBMer to a two-bit startup company. Meanwhile, Gerstner walked out with over $189 million severance pay. His son died choking on a steak sandwich a couple of years ago .

[CJay]

my HP probook 6460b is going strong after 4 years of heavy usage and carrying it in a backpack everyday... so i don't know what you talking about i do even have a cheapo HP 250 G4 and after 1 year of usage not a single problem..

The HP machines along with most other 'brand' manufacturers, are made in a few grades, there's consumer crap, business and business elite, Probooks sit right in the middle and are a good, reliable machine.

6460b is  lovely machine and I'd give one house space any time.

HP Elitebook 6930p is my daily drive, it's still rock solid although it's been upgraded a bit. I do have much newer machines but I like the 6930.

[rsjsouza]

Once I got an incredible offer on a Hewlett Packard DV6000 that was part of their business line but it was rigged with issues. To make things worse, this was a laptop that was given to my then father-in-law that lives abroad - the damn thing died within the first year or use and we had to haul it to US to fix it. It didn't help this laptop died again about two years after this episode.

At that time I had bought my wife a Toshiba laptop that, unbeknownst to us, it would last us 10 years. She is in her second Toshiba laptop.

[VK5RC]

With a family of 3 children in the teens,  I have had 2 HP,  2Toshiba 1 Mac laptops,  MacAir and iPad,  all still going (allowing for age and software bloat) What are you guys doing to your equipment? (Actually we have been lucky)
Now iPhones,  they really fall to bits! I have lost count of screens,  backs,  power and home  buttons!

[wraper]

Once I got an incredible offer on a Hewlett Packard DV6000 that was part of their business line but it was rigged with issues.

If DV2000 / DV6000 / DV9000 series laptop had dedicated Nvidia 8x00 series GPU and / or chipset, it was born to die. Blame goes for both Nvidia for crappy chips with cracking bumps in BGA and HP for crappy cooling. If it didn't had any Nvidia inside, it was reliable enough. Although they also had batteries dying fast because of crappy cooling, batteries got really hot, and therefore degraded really fast.

[rsjsouza]

Once I got an incredible offer on a Hewlett Packard DV6000 that was part of their business line but it was rigged with issues.

If DV2000 / DV6000 / DV9000 series laptop had dedicated Nvidia 8x00 series GPU and / or chipset, it was born to die. Blame goes for both Nvidia for crappy chips with cracking bumps in BGA and HP for crappy cooling. If it didn't had any Nvidia inside, it was reliable enough. Although they also had batteries dying fast because of crappy cooling, batteries got really hot, and therefore degraded really fast.

Yes, that was the first issue with this HP while the second issue was something unrelated.

Despite at that time my company had furnished me with a Dell Latitude D630c with the same Nvidia chipset, requiring the motherboard to be replaced twice under their warranty agreement, it did not take out the bad taste in my mouth with my first experience with HP laptops.

In this case, I should have perhaps added to my initial reply this is my opinion: everyone is entitled to one given their walks of life.

[rrinker]

With a family of 3 children in the teens,  I have had 2 HP,  2Toshiba 1 Mac laptops,  MacAir and iPad,  all still going (allowing for age and software bloat) What are you guys doing to your equipment? (Actually we have been lucky)
Now iPhones,  they really fall to bits! I have lost count of screens,  backs,  power and home  buttons!

 What are you guys doing to your phones? I still have my first iPhone, a 3G and it still works if charged up. I have the Palm Treo 650 I had before it, too, and as it was working I think it probably still would if I could find the charger. I had my iPhone 4S too, until I gave it to a friend who broke hers - and it less than a month she had the screen all smashed.  I used it for 2 years without a scratch - and no case. I've had mu current 5S for a while now, got it just before the 6 came out, and it still works fine. My GF broke THREE Galaxy S3's in a 2 year period - ran over one, went swimming with the second (and she was NOT thrown in the pool), and blames the dog for making her drop the third on the kitchen floor (ceramic tile) and destroying the screen.
 But I was like that ever since I was a kid. My toys always lasted - until my baby sister got her hands on them. There were some she stayed away from, and indeed after 40+ years of storage I actually found some of my old things while cleaning out the house (I just turned 50). Still in usable condition.

[Wilksey]

I guess they have been in the spotlight quite a bit for failures, my first experience with a major fault on a laptop (I exclude HDD's which can be replaced and RAM) was the NVIDIA chipset failing, I managed to temporarily fix a few by re-heating the area around the chip up with a SMD Station, but they ultimately failed again.

But, I have a HP laptop that works fine, still going strong, Probook 450, it's a business model but seems solid enough, didn't cost the earth either, I think I paid £300 or so for it, it's not the best laptop but for code bashing it's fine.

[AriRio]

I bougth HP zbook 17 G5 in 2018. The notebook is fast and can have more ssd disks, but it is unreliable. I had to visit the hp service more than 10 times - faulty motherboard, windows re-installation, faulty ssd disk, unexpected freezing, wrongly installed windows by hp etc. The last problem still not solved by HP service although the notebook has still warranty. Final recommendation - avoid it at all cost.

[iMo]

ProBook 450 G2 here, 5y old, running 24x7, SSD, absolutely no problems so far..

[GlennSprigg]

I guess they have been in the spotlight quite a bit for failures, my first experience with a major fault on a laptop (I exclude HDD's which can be replaced and RAM) was the NVIDIA chipset failing, I managed to temporarily fix a few by re-heating the area around the chip up with a SMD Station, but they ultimately failed again.

But, I have a HP laptop that works fine, still going strong, Probook 450, it's a business model but seems solid enough, didn't cost the earth either, I think I paid £300 or so for it, it's not the best laptop but for code bashing it's fine.

Yes, you are right. (I've posted about this awhile ago, but caused some confusion).
About 8 to 10 years ago, there were a HUGE batch of generic model HP Laptops that were failing. They were mostly failing due to the surface mounting of the Video chip.  HP were so swamped with complaints, they ended up not answering any more notifications/calls.  I received 15 such Laptops at a repair shop interstate over a short period of time, that were 'written off'. In general, they could be brought back to life by removal & reflowing of the video chip. By the following year though, their name was mud, although new products are fine!

The other problem I regularly found with them, (though to a much lesser degree), was apparent 'screen' failure.  This was virtually 100% of the time due to the failure of the 'Backlight' circuitry, and nothing else!  You only need to open the screen cover itself, and change the small PCB for the backlight control, for about $5 to $10 in about 20 mins!   

P.S.   You can easily see if the problem is the backlight.  Turn it on, and take it out in the Sun. Move it around to reflect the light, and you can still faintly see the text/images on the screen that's meant to be there! 

[wraper]

I received 15 such Laptops at a repair shop interstate over a short period of time, that were 'written off'. In general, they could be brought back to life by removal & reflowing of the video chip.

Thanks for churning out 15 still faulty laptops which soon died again