Anyone else seeing HP laptops failing at an alarming rate that are around a year to 18 months old? Our company laptops mostly Zbook Firefly 14 are suddenly bricking and /or unable to charge. or have randomly stopped display out from the USB-C ports. Seems to be centered around the G9 series which are 12th gen intel, although some G8 and G10 models are affected. Hard reset procedures get some of them going again, but others we are unable to resolve. We are actively switching to Dell, so feels like HP sent out a bricking bug to punish us.
Well intel 13th and 14th gen chips have been selfdestructing for about 2 years now
Switch to dell won’t help with that, consider an AMD option
I think it was this video
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If only I had that level of influence at my company. I would totally go AMD.
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If my Precision is any indication Dell won’t be much better… The last few bios updates have made it slow and laggy and its kind of random if it wants to wake up from sleep.
yeah the Dells have their own set of issues. but at least are not bricking yet.
There is a fundamental problem with tech reviews - you get it on your desk use it for a bit and you call it good if it works and performs well.
However, some countries enforce minimum warranty period of 2 years and it feels like some manufacturers got really good at building it to fail soon after that, I’m almost sure.
Now this is a sample size of one shop and my theory, but my friend who deals with computers for more than 20 years now has noticed some interesting trends.
- There is almost no HP laptops older than 3 years that come for an OS install
- HP laptops older than 10 years still show up regularly, mostly probooks
- ASUS is starting the same trend in the last 4 years or so
- Plenty of Lenovo laptops show up every day, no gaps in model years
- Dell is relatively regular with not many gaps. They have more issues with broken power bricks, drivers not working, refusing to turn on sometimes
When you look at local price comparison sites, this is the top 3 offering looks like:
Manufacturer - number of configurations available
Hp - 901
Lenovo - 740
Dell - 264
I know this doesn’t really help your situation, but maybe consult with someone who deals with OS reinstall and repair, they will probably have some idea what works and what doesn’t.
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Unfortunately nowadays even business laptops are trash. Better than consumer laptops, but still trash.
What really helped me, is changing how I look at prices of a laptop. I calculate the yearly cost based on the total warranty. After the warranty, I assume that the laptop is broken and worth 0$.
A 2000$ Dell laptop with a 5y Dell NBD on site warranty costs me 400$ per year.
A 1000$ Dell laptop with the normal 2y warranty costs me 500$ per year.
If a laptop lasts longer than the warranty, I count it as a win. But I don’t assume it will last longer than warranty. In this example, the initially more expensive laptop is cheaper in the long run.
Many big companies lease their devices for only a few years. Guess the incentive for producing lasting laptops has become pretty low.
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My old employer had this „always newest“ subscription from Dell, they would just swap in your ssd and hand you a brand new model every year.
This is one way to deal with it, but this also gives the manufacturer zero incentive to change the behaviour, since their product became a service.
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Got a pretty broad selection of HP and some Dell machines under my watch.
The failure rate of HP are quite high, I’d say. We got at least two on the healing bench every month. Plethora of issues across many model-years (G8 to G10):
- USB-C port failing (docking not possible, charging okay)
- Failure to charge
- just dead (like, plugged in, charging LED on, press power button, nothing)
- bad screens
- Two counts of overheating due to thermal-paste application SNAFU
Dell machines in the fleet are not without fault, but AFAIK only one was “catastrophic” (dead battery in week 1 of operation).
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its like with there printers, Hp’s first concern is the stock holder. not the consumer.
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For laptops? No. I’ve had far more issues with AMD business laptops sharting themselves. They also usually ship with a substandard WiFi/Bluetooth card (Realtek, Qualcomm, MediaTek) that cause all sorts of network connectivity problems. If it’s a slotted card, no problem… rip it out and upgrade to an Intel AX210. But some of the newer ones have the crappy WiFi chip soldered directly to the mainboard.
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Wouldn’t be the BIOS battery being low? I’d check before going down the rabbit hole. It’s got me once on an Elitebook. Could just be a bad battery batch .
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Yes. I knew an employee of Toshiba + WD (US). Manufacture QC goal was (warranty + 1/n). Less than warranty was a fail but warranty plus a small fraction of a year was right. Warranty + n was a loss overall despite happier* customers.
This was the 90s! Oh so far we’ve come.
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I work in a primarily Dell shop. I highly recommend pushing for the 5 year pro support warranty. Basic support is a raw pain to deal with and if your work is anything like mine, some dept will try and run their devices well past when they are supposed to.
For overall reliability. Dell tends to vary every model refresh. Some model years will seem to hold up very well. While others may as well have been built from paper mache where a slight breeze will cause them to break. So far we’ve had really good luck with Lenovo’s systems, but I’d still recommend extending the warranty.
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MTBF for components is overwhelming based on usage (not age), while warranties are based on calendar time. Companies really can’t target “2 year life” for their laptops and hit anywhere near it for both heavy and light users. Compare A) Someone typing on their laptop 14 hours a day and B) Someone who pulls their laptop out of their bag and use it once a week.
I’ll be happy when Laptops start becoming modular… For tiny laptops a special small-size keyboard and touchpad makes sense, but for most they could just publish dimensions and electrical specs and everybody could be making keyboards and pointer devices that could be swapped into most laptops. Then we wouldn’t have to live with awful chicklet keyboards and touchpads.
Right, but those people are not relevant in this case - they would have less problems, less chance to mess up their OS and their laptops would overshoot minimum warranty period. Just target for 8h/day user and voila!
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Everything made during COVID is failing at crazy rates.
I am staring at a stack of dead SSD’s made from 2020-2022.
That same QC stayed low until this year across vendors.
We mostly work with enterprise and gaming machines so it all depends.
The laptops we roll out now are just gaming machines with Windows 11 Pro, bitlocker, and additional drive for local backups.
This started when a client was asking for a laptop that was $6000 from Lenovo with a 3 month wait. We set them up with an MSI for $2600 and identical specs.
2 years later and that beast is still chugging but we’ve had the same Lenovo models we were waitlisted for come in for service multiple times.
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It certainly could be that, but not getting any errors for that on the units we have revived. These machines get used pretty hard so are regularly on their chargers. They don’t normally sit around with the main battery drained which would strain the cmos battery. I’ll take a look at this though the next failure I come across.
Received DOA today.
First 11th gen machine off to a great start 
I had another G9 that bricked this morning. Luckily this one responded to the mute(F5) plus power hard reset trick. I was able to connect remote and run HPIA. it found it needed 7 updates including a bunch of drivers and Bios update. Survived all that and seems to be working again. I just don’t know what is in common on these devices except for relative age at this point. I don’t expect any recent hardware to last forever, but 2 to 3 years isn’t too much to ask. Or is it now?
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