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this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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Technology
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Look, I fucking hate HP so don't take this as supporting them in any way, but I don't think what you're describing is possible. The tower is nothing more than a bunch of mounting points to attach hardware made by other manufacturers. They don't make motherboards or chips. They could maybe have a deal for a custom branded bios maybe with certain settings locked down. They could have some shitware installed in windows, but none of that would have an impact before windows loaded.
I just don't see how what you're describing is possible even if they wanted to. It would be a major scandal and everyone would've heard about it. Remember the Sony rootkit CDs?
I had an HP laptop in the early 2000s, the hard drive crashed (my wife set some mail on top of it and the mail had a large advertising magnet in it). I bought a replacement. When I opened it up, the hard drive connector was HP proprietary. A replacement drive from HP was $475 for the same size that I paid $80 for an industry standard drive. I bought a replacement laptop instead and have been warning people against HP for the last 20 years. Many people come to me for IT help (entire extended family), so I am sure I have hurt HP some. Their printer drivers are the biggest bloatware crap too. Absolutely scum company.
I can’t explain it either but it happened with 2 different CD-ROM devices until I put in an HP model one. The GPU could’ve just been a random thing, but the CD-ROM was a pretty weird coincidence. Trust me, it made no fucking sense to me either, but it’s only ever happened to me with that HP tower and I’ve built a handful of PCs myself. If someone had a better explanation (2 faulty non-HP drives in a row?), I’d accept that too.
For context, this was probably around 2001 or 2002.
Do someone else's point. HP does have a custom BIOS they develop themselves.
Not sure about GPUs and desktops, but they did lock out all but specific wireless adapters in the laptops. This was done in the custom BIOS.
HP and/or Compaq used to make their own PCs in the 90's going into the 2000's.
For example they used to have special motherboards that were basically backplanes and CPU cards to suit.It's quite possible they did dumb shit with IDE connectors/pinouts that meant that some devices didn't work.
It wouldn't have been a major scandal, it just would have been, "yeah some aftermarket drives don't work with HP", which was pretty common across the entire market back then. We're basically in the golden age of system compatibility right now, things were an absolute shitshow back then.
Honestly, I figured it was just some wonky shit with those cheap Pavilion parts and didn’t think much of it at the time. I was mostly just annoyed that I couldn’t really do much of anything with the tower. All was well when I could finally afford to build my own!
Unless the front panel of HP is like Dell where the thing that looks like regular usb media reader cable is proprietary to the motherboard connectors. Even dell fans are wired differently and need adapters. Plugging Dell media reader into standard motherboard means clipping wires and soldering to standard usb. Not sure how CD drive would have proprietary though unless that plugged into something indirect of sata connection
I know more about Dell than HP but they likely do make their own motherboards. If memory serves, they even at one point had a different PSU pinout that would fry the mobo if you tried to use a standard power supply. They could easily program their PCIE chipset to reject GPUs that aren't sold with the computer, for example, under the guise of "keeping the warranty valid" in case of "third party hardware"
I never had an HP. Back in the day, I mostly built my own computers and worked on computers that weren't mass-produced. But I guess you're right. There nineties were a real wild west of computer hardware before PCs were commoditized. I didn't know HP made their own motherboards, but I can see it.