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Recent HP Laptops Shipped CPU-Choking Wi-Fi Driver
An anonymous reader writes "Computer manufacturers have recently come under fire for the continued practice of shipping machines with excessive bloatware. Software preinstalled on some recent HP laptops was worse than normal though, consuming anywhere from 25-99% CPU by making incessant WMI queries, resulting in overheating laptops and reduced battery life. Users on a computer Q&A site did some sleuthing, and revealed that HP Wireless Assistant — software which does nothing but tell the user when their WiFi adapter is turned on or off — was causing the problem. According to an HP support forum, the problem is fixed in later versions, but thousands of laptops have the software installed, and the software does not get updated automatically."
As someone who fixes computers for a living, I can tell you that HP has the WORST bloatware, both preinstalled on new computers and included with their ridiculous, 200MB printer drivers.
... I make a DVD backup of the restore partition and wipe clean the HDD whenever I buy a new laptop.
I recently had the same issue with a loaded Dell Latitude E6510. The supplied video driver for WinXP consumed an entire core on my 3.0GHz i7. I contacted Dell on the issue and told them what was happening. I ended up using the driver from nVidia. The CPU would get very hot and the fan would run at full speed.
I know, good story - right?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
e.g. Did you know you cannot simply replace the HP buildin wireless with a pci-express card version because the wireless needs to be on a bios whitelist.
Doesn't HP have something like Toshiba's "Tempro" utility to tell Joe Sixpack when to update his drivers and HP-related programs?
Let's talk about CPU-choking check-for-update services. Ever tried to disable GoogleUpdater? I mean really disable it? Or the Adobe "Let's interrupt the boot process with our bullshit" updater? Or my favorite this week - was recently straightening out a friends machine and found an updater service from Intuit running - my friend had installed and used TurboTax to do his taxes last year, so naturally a system service had to be running to check for updates to tax software for FY2009.
I see the <i>italic</i> tags are still broken, damn this web 2.0 stuff is HARD, isn't it?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
And I let her know how much I appreciate her for saying that about my driver.
while(true)
{
if(wifi_is_on())
show_wifi_is_on()
else
show_wifi_is_off()
}
This is why whenever I buy a computer or a laptop, the first thing that I do is to slick the damn thing and install the operating system as I see fit.
Whether this be Windows or some flavor of *nix, I just wipe out all the partitions and install from fresh.
I learned that lesson with an HP laptop I bought in 2005. No matter what I did, no matter what I uninstalled, I could not get more than 45% of my hard drive free.
I did a fresh load of XP and low and behold, I was only using 10% of the drive with Office, XP, my music files, a couple of games and my applications in my "Must Have" list.
Ever since, I do this on all of the ones at the hospital. I made a fresh load version for every configuration we have and I keep an image saved on our servers. Since we don't allow anything to be saved on the local computers that are on the hospital floors (our way of enforcing HIPPA on our electronically protected health information (EPHI)), this means that if someone sneaks online and lets slip in a virus, I can just wipe-restore from the network, run updates, and the computer is back in business in usually less than an hour. Less than 15 minutes in some cases.
For administration PC's, it's a bit longer. I have to backup their data first and then slick and reload. Then I have to put the data back. So that's more in the 30-90 minutes category.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
This would be easier if you could find an OEM willing to ship you a blank machine to begin with. Well not easier, exactly, but you could at least be happier not paying for any extra crap you weren't going to use anyway. Microsoft should be happier too, to be getting full retail for any copies of Windows they sell, and you could be happier too charging your less technical friends $40 an hour (Friends and family get the special discount rate!) to drop a new OS on their system. It's not like they buy a new laptop every month!
All right yeah I realize this view is perhaps unrealistically optimistic, but hey, it works for me!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There should be a list of Programs that can (or should be) removed from a Factory Install for safe operation.
Trackpad Drivers, Media Button Drivers and WiFi Drivers may be required to take full advantage of the hardware features, but most of the crap they put on is Third Party Crapware (on cheap machines) or Brand Enhancement software (on "Quality" machines). The worse stuff is the iLife wannabe software from a dozen Third-Party vendors that don't work together.
Maybe MS need to expand their restrictions on WM7 bloatware and customisation to Windows 7 OEMs. Buying a computer with third-party implementation of Native Windows features really dilutes the brand.
One of the reasons MacBooks and MacBook Pros work so well as Windows Laptops is because BootCamp only installs the drivers needed to keep the hardware functioning. Apple even look after their users who run Windows!
There's really no reason wireless device and PC makers even need to have "assistant" type programs written for their hardware to start with. They only need a driver itself, as Windows since XP has had it's own configuration utility with a system tray icon telling you when you're connected or not.
OT: PS to Slashdot coders: I'd really like to be able to use Firefox's spellchecker in here again. It highlights misspelled words but I can't correct them with it ever since you forced this dumb new layout on us. Same with italic tags not working anymore. Have you ever heard the phrase "if it aint broken don't fix it"?
maybe they got payed by the electricity provider ;)
Jayme Guitierrez wrote a great song about his experience trying to clean the cooling fan on an HP Pavillion. http://tinyurl.com/6yeay5b Maybe he should write another about HP's wifi program. It must be easier to make software impossible than it was to make hardware impossible.
last summer I was given(by work) a hp elitebook(15 incher, about).
recently I did the switch to using it, ssd'ing it as well. and damn, it's a nice machine, coupled with windows 7. with windows xp and the preinstalled stuff, not so much.
the reason why the hp wlan manager sucks is simple too, it's unnecessary to begin with, it's decored so that it doesn't follow the native look'n'feel, it's designed by a USER EXPERIENCE idiot committee, not by a committee that knew what it actually could be used for or who knew how the wlan bit actually worked(it would be useful tool if it had options for adjusting this offending wmi, transmit powers etc - the stuff you'd still have to adjust from driver properties if you were using it).
now, if finding working notebook gpu drivers wasn't that much of an adventure(the gpu in that elitebook is nvidia mvs 5100, in other words it's some recent gf but it's a hit and miss which drivers work).
but something about windows 7 surprised me: it automatically downloaded the software for the ms keyboard I have, which was released before vista but which vista lacked built in driver acquirement for, as it needs some special sw for the programmable keys. so after installing the os and installing winamp, I could control winamp with the keyboard play/pause/stop/next/prev buttons - without doing any configuration. THIS is how things should work, but very few companies seem to focus that their machines would work like that - instead they brand the shit out of everything from volume adjuster to power profile management.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What? I thought Ling Ching Vee 2000 Plus Plus lite edition combo DVD silencer, video driver, all around document file re-associater/viewer with built-in auto-update and tray icon 'quick menu' plus customizable ring-tone notifier was what everybody wants?
damn sure i wouldn't BUY another Windows OS as soon as i bought a new computer, i have a couple of clean OEM discs and just use the serial glued to the new toy, if you can get a couple of clean OEMs it certainly makes the whole affair a tidier one. Still think most folks would be more than happier with a Distro like Linux Mint, PCLinuxOS or Mepis, ones that come with codecs & flash .. then they can do their
Farmville or whatever it is. my customers really like it :)
Bloatware is a major pita for any computer tech whose gotta remove it or for any average joe who actually notice that it's the reason their computer is slower than it can be. I argue that its a necessary evil for retail laptops though
Next time someone asks you to help them pick a laptop tell them they can get x model for a bargain at $899 or they can get x model - hassle of bloatware for $1199. Just about everyone i know would take the model with the bloatware cause its cheaper and deal with the problem later.
I forgot to mention the free bing/yahoo/google combo volume control toolbar for Internet Explorer with bonus Windows Explorer context menu add-on [Is Not Responding]. Apple would have this too, along with malware and viruses, but its just not 'popular' enough.
HP ruleZ!
go webOS!
people could make their own laptops the way you can make a desktop. Cell phone too. Tablet also.
Are just plain evil to begin with. Broadcom, Intel, HP, Dell, whomever it comes from, I've yet to encounter one that didn't interfere with the normal function of the computer in some way.
Buy a Mac
Even though some might say that HP Wireless Assistant is bloatware, it isn't really.
It lets you switch on/off individual "wireless devices", like Bluetooth, WiFi or the newer WWAN adapters. Turning the ones off you don't need will definitely save battery life, and it might add some security.
And before anyone says "hey, that's what device manager is for", it's not. Device manager allows you to disable devices, but that would require administrator privileges, whereas the HP Wireless Assistant allows any user to do that.
I do agree, though, that much of the software on the machines you buy in the store is rubbish and is only there so you can buy your computer for less money than you could if the software wasn't there. Think about it.
This is true of Lenovo as well, and I suspect of any notebook manufacturer who cares about FCC regulations.
One must ask, "Why are the manufacturers pre-installing this bloat?". My guess is that it helps manufactures keep low prices on machines that otherwise would be out of reach for many consumers wrt to price. Consumers are hungry for slick deals and manufacturers need creative ways to re-coup money lost on razor thin profit margins. So, the manufacture reaches out to other companies and say "Hey, I will put a link to a 30-day trial of your software on our core image of all new laptops, just give us $10.00 per laptop." They do that 10 times and now they can sell the laptop for $10.00 over cost and still make $100 per laptop.
Ask yourself this, if you saw an option on the build-your-own-laptop build site that said "Clean O/S Install - No Advertising or Bloat" with a price tag of $99.95 would you check the box? What about the average Joe consumer looking for that great deal?
Wow, just the other day I found out Lenovo was guilty of doing that too.
Dell, HP, Toshiba all feel they need to install "helperware" that is nothing more than :Hinderware. Whenever I buy a new laptop the first thing I have to do is crack open the windows OS CD and reinstall the OS. IT's faster than stripping out all he crap that dell and the others shovel into these things. and that's only if I am keen enough to see the checkmark to include the recovery media when I buy it. HP tell you to go F***K yourself and will not give you any recovery media but make you waste 2 hours creating it from the laptop. (That and their retarded trackpad design makes HP top slot on my never buy list)
Why cant these laptop makers do the simple task of... Give me a clean OS install with drivers. NO OTHER CRAPWARE....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The last HP laptop I bought (2007) contained a complete infestation of bloatware. IT easily spent 20 hours removing various bits and pieces until my machine worked sorta correctly. I remain stunned that some large corporate entity hasn't given HP the back of their hand by now.
"After all, Microsoft essentially invented the smartphone over a decade ago, long before the iPhone. Where did it get them?"
It got them laughed out of the phone world because they were stupid claiming they invented the smartphone.
Palm and Qualicomm had working mass produced smartphones way WAY before Microsoft even knew what cellphones were for.
Then they come along acting like they invented the smartphone and everyon ignores them are the idiot in the classroom that tries to get credit for what everyone else has done.
Nokia and PALM INVENTED the smartphone market, then Blackberry jumped in, for years before microsoft got off their butt and pulled a "mee too" with their very first smartphone running windows CE and it was a giant turd. even CE re branded as windows smartphone 2002 was crap and was outsold hard by the Palm Treo that had hardware problems, but it was better than having to reboot your phone daily because windows CE is unstable and useless. Back then the Palm platform ruled as you could use ANY palm pilot app on a palm smartphone. This gave a PALM phone a GIANT edge over everyone else.
Microsoft did not invent anything in the smartphone arena, they always have been an anklebiter trying to play catchup. They need to stop this and go back to OS and BackOffice software.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's a very well put together song, and he has a point. However, it's a laptop - we demand all these power-packed machines in a tiny space with low weight, so there are going to be compromises made in the relative ease of taking it apart.
He says he wants a Mac instead, and while I love Apple Macs, he's going to find the exact same problem when he comes to take it apart and clean the fan(s) - multiple screws, removal of all sorts of pieces, damn near stripping the thing to the bone to get to something like the fan, since it tends to be one unit that is part of the heatsink assembly, or at the very least intertwined with it (the fans on the Powerbook 15", for example, are separate, but you can't replace the RHS one without removing the logic board, and you can't replace the one in the 12" without removing the heatsink). He will also find that Apple laptops have similar un-re-usable thermal pads that provide the interface between the CPU, GPU and the heatsink. The unibody line of MB and MBPs are a different beast again.
It's common to all laptops, and unless you make consideration to taking them apart in the design stage, it's going to be designed with miniaturisation, cooling efficiency and weight in mind. Ease of servicing is not even on the list, or if it is it's right at the bottom. Looking at the video the Pavillion looks no more difficult or involved to take apart than the many Apple laptops I have done over the years (as a skilled hobbyist, not as a job). It's not for the faint of heart, but they were never designed to be "easy to clean the fan" - if he wanted an easy machine to work on at home, he should have bought a desktop.
My Sony Vaio has Vaio Care which automatically notifies me of updates. So easy. Vaio is great!
wake up and hold your nose
On my mac HP sofware is the most invasive POS I have. it's runs multiple daemons and keeps re-installing itself when I remove only parts of it. It's not compatible with the managed users (parental controls). It uses a few percent of my CPU. Since I hardly ever use my scanner I don't actually need to have it ready to respond to it. When I want to use my scanner I'd just as soon start up an ap to listen. I don't need the daemons running all the time. And of course they only make the software for you particular model fo 5 years. then along comes some OS update and wham, the software is spweing errors into your logs and chewing up wads of CPU. This has happened to me twice no on two different HPs. I was dumb enough to assume they would have learned from the first five years of making crap, how to make a good driver. The second one is just as bad as the first in terms of software design, excess cpu, and invasiveness. The printer itself is quite good.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Had an HP all in one and installed the driver on my laptop. If the priinter was not plugged in to the laptop the driver would continously look for the printer, to the tune of 90% CPU usage. This driver also killed my onboard card reader. Finally found the piece of the driver that was causing the trouble and renamed it. The pruinter still works fine without it.
Not only is that evil, but it's also realllly stupid. Anyone remember IBM's attempt at desktop and server control called Microchannel? Was this another horrible bit of Carly Fiorina damage that just hasn't been cleaned up yet, or is HP truly about to sink to the bottom?
The worst part is, the bloat wasn't actually "preinstalled" on the laptop I got.
The first time the piece of shit booted, I got to wait while it was installed for me, with no option to cancel/exit.
THEN I had to uninstall each program.
It was as logical as a factory full of retards producing something in the slowest way possible, then immediately packaging it up just to be sent to the landfill next door via a bicycle courier with two flat tires.
Total time invested: about two hours.
Sounds a heck of a lot more attractive than Dell's RAID cards having a harddrive whitelist (consisting of only drives with dell firmwares).
HP has been doing this for way longer than I care to remember. I have a 4xPPro HP NetServer, which would only let you use "HP certified" Pentium Pro CPUs... and RAID controller... and hard drives... and probably everything else. If you tried installing rogue hardware, it would even refuse to POST.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I just bought my wife a HP Pavilion DM4. Knowing that bloatware would be a problem, I created the restore DVDs (8!) and wiped the disk. When re-setting up, I downloaded the drivers for my specific model (DM4-1253cl) but wifi would not work with either the Intel or the other (Raytech?) driver.
In desperation, I did a restore and lo and behold, the hardware for wifi is Broadcom. Yet HP offers NO Broadcom drivers for wifi to download. Fortunately the restore leaves a directory with all the right drivers, so I copied those and was able to do a clean install.
My other gripe, which I think is related, is HP, and I'm sure others, habit of having umbrella model numbers (DM4) and then 20 or more variations. I'm assuming my model isn't a 1253cl but some other similar model, that, or HP switched parts and the web site never got updated. The latter is likely -- I discovered this morning the download page for the ML330 G3 server doesnt offer drivers for the LSI CSB6 IDE RAID controller, either, and it's on the machine in front of me's mainboard.
My company has a new policy that software made from HP will not be considered. (Bug tracking, Process management software, drivers, etc..)
All the computers I've bought recently haven't had this problem at all. You just open the box and start using it. It's almost as if the company that makes them doesn't hate its customers.
Plus, they are shiny.
Weird.
And at least one of the Adobe background apps, the one that launches Acrobat at boot so that later it won't take so long to load.
You need to use msconfig. Just press the windows key and type 'msconfig'. One of the tabs in there has startup items. You'll see GoogleUpdate in there. Uncheck it and then you'll have to reboot (msconfig has a poor UI in that way) and the item won't load anymore.
Many apps will install another copy of their startup item when they update if you've unchecked the previous one. But GoogleUpdate isn't one of these.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The system is currently unavailable. Please try again later. wpa-pl-wpaframework-10000
You can thank the FCC for that one.
jo_ham (604554), you make a very good point about Jayme's song mysteriously concluding that an Apple laptop would make his life easier. (A Thinkpad would make more sense). But doesn't the HP Pavilion have over-heating issues? Maintaining the fan on that laptop is not simply optional.
Gently reply
FCC regulations only get involved if the card supports 5GHz (a/n) operation. Until relatively recently, 5GHz Wi-Fi devices had to be certified with their antenna and could not have a detachable antenna. That's no longer true, but it was a concern in the past. As long as the card passes it's FCC testing, and the built-in antenna passed with some card, it should now be allowable to replace any compatible card that passed FCC testing. IANAL, that's just my understanding of the current regulations.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Dell says that, but I've never had an significant issue using non-Dell drives on their RAID controllers. Getting the drive trays can be challenging. I've also found that it's often cheaper to order the machine minimally configured on drives, and buy extra drives (with trays) from Dell parts and service. That's not always true, but it's worth checking into when ordering a machine.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Anyone have any idea which models/versions are affected by this issue? I constantly run into this on almost a daily basis.
When is Windows going to get a package management system so software companies don't have to keep reinventing the wheel?
Not exclusive to HP, if that is the case. IBM used to do that back when they were still in the laptop business. For at IBM laptops, at least, it was easy enough to hack the BIOS to disable the whitelisting. Hell, there was a utility to do it for you. I haven't run across that problem with HPs yet, but I bet the hackers are not far behind if they haven't cracked it already.
Ubuntu runs just fine on an HP machine. (And a clean install of Windows XP or Win 7 too, in case someone was wondering). Does anyone ever actually use the OS that comes with a laptop anymore?
How do you troubleshoot one of these wmi issues? Doesn't it just show 'wmiprvse.exe' as the top process?
Can't you bypass the bios, which is essentially just a vestigial piece of software nowdays? Ie, use a driver that also does PCI enumeration first in order to find the card.
I have a HP 2605dn printer, its a fantastic full duplex color laser from a couple years back. I picked it up cheap, but I'm totally annoyed that the universal print drivers HP now uses, seem to keep my machine from going into standby reliably. I regularly have to kill the spooler to fix the problem. Uninstalling the HP drivers, is the other solution.
IBM(Lenovo Thinkpad) too, fuckers.
As of 2010, it is apparently the case. From what Ive read all RAID cards newer than the H700 are "affected". I have not had a chance to test yet, since I prefer to get my drives from newegg for 50% less, and have thus tried to avoid the affected cards.
Drivers may lock all the cores in the computer causing it to do stuff in an endless loop, but doing stuff should never cause a laptop to overheat. That is just poor hardware design.
Reminds me of the products that are designed to sit under laptops and blow air on the base. Why should that ever be needed? If a laptop isn't capable of being used on either a lap, or an insulated wooden desk then you have a design flaw, go back to the drawing board.
I'll keep that in mind. Last Dell server I installed was Mar 2010, don't recall which RAID card. Went with 4 Dell drives, so no data to confirm or deny.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
""if it aint broken don't fix it" Should read... If it ain't broke, fix it until it is...
Windows assumes you are an idiot...Linux demands proof.
HP needs to test their shit before putting them on a computer. This puts microsoft in bad light as well. This is the reason why aapl is kicking ass. I really wish micrsoft could tighten the noose around these crappy softwares and put an end to this. Imagine the plight of a novice customer who bought this laptop and later cursed windows for bad performance.