Bad HP support for laptop BIOS fix

I would like to share with all of you what happened to me so you may avoid the pitfall. In a very short summary, the problem I am having here is that HP falsely advertise its BIOS fix to be available for Windows XP, but it is not.

Let's begin with my needed for a laptop to develop some application and so I decided to go shopping. Laptop shopping is a bit difficult today, it is like going to the fish market, depending on the day you may find different things and you may have to "adapt" to what you find. What I mean is that I had my nice list of "Linux" compatible laptops but when you arrive to the dealer you got to chose what there is.

Normally I buy from Italian CDC (around February 2008) and I did ask for a Linux laptop. It is funny to see the fake look of "we never heard of it" (they are one of the biggest reseller in Italy) and that look just means that they are either incompetent or simply being paid to "pretend Linux does not exist".

In any case I ended up buying a dv9710el since it was reasonably cheap and apparently Linux/Ubuntu supported (meaning that generally speaking the video/Ethernet/disks/usb where "supported". As you all probably know we are in Microsoft Vista time and therefore my laptop was Vista pre loaded.

I started Vista, it was a chance to see it, first BIG disappointment is that even if it provides the "English" language choice it does not actually have it and therefore it reverts to Italian. Then the other BIG disappointment was that I had to agree to the Vista licence even to make the recovery disks. Kind of like having to sign a licence for looking at the shelf of a supermarket ! I was not interested on Vista (even thought I paid for it) and I still think that if I have to "agree" on a separate "licence" to use Vista, then I is not sold at the point of sale (otherwise I would not have to agree on anything, I already did at the point of sale), therefore, by not agreeing on the "licence" I did not buy Vista and I should not pay for it.

I just zapped everything and went to Ubuntu, of course Microsoft counts my licence as another Vista on the world and I have ended up paying for something I did not want or use. No matter how much you pretend to say this is "fair", this is NOT fair. Of all the laptops in CDC NONE had Linux.

Let me tell you something, the current state of things is that big companies just make it "difficult" to have what you want and so they can get away with a Judge saying "see, if the customer wants he can get Linux, it is not impossible !". This will continue until the "cost" and "reward" for a complain is not on equal measure, this means that the cost for a company to abuse a single customer is small (the worse cost is for the company to refund the "faulty" product) and the reward is enormous (immagine something like 50dollars multiplied millions of copies. For a customer the cost of litigation is enormous (time and lawyer) compared with the tiny reward (the refund of the faulty product). Balancing the costs and reward, means that if a company gains XXXXX millions on illegal practices then the reward of the suing customer should be of millions, not just a product refund !

One day I decided to see if there is a BIOS upgrade for my laptop, I went to HP website and found my laptop, and there really is a BIOS upgrade. Of course a BIOS upgrade is to fix DEFECTS in the BIOS, this meaning that the machine is faulty and there is a way to fix it. It may be something important like the NVIdia chipset burning out or faulty USB handling of faulty fan handling, anyway it is a fault.

Once upon a time, BIOS upgrade was done using a floppy or CD, this was of course safe and vendor independent. Not anymore. The website mention no possibility of such CD and allows for either Windows XP or Vista as a BIOS flashing program. No other possibility was available, so I fired up a temporary copy of XP to try to upgrade the bios. I think it is mad to have an entire OS installed just to upgrade the BIOS

I did download the file and tried to run it. The program starts, ask me to agree on some sort of licence and then says

This bios is not for your notebook PC