Warning about HP Laptops - incompatibility with Win 10 Creators Update

[Mouse]

Hi Everyone

I have a problem with my HP Pavilion 15 Notebook laptop (which is only 3 years old) not being compatible with Win 10 Creators Update, and I wanted to make other HP laptop users aware of the issue.

My computer is slow, prone to 'hanging' and many of my graphics apps freeze, take ages to save, and crash when attempting gradient fills, drop shadows and blurs. My browser continually crashes - especially when I have another app running in the background. In short, the whole experience has become a bit of a nightmare.

I initially thought this might be due to lack of RAM (I have 4GB RAM), but a 5 minute search on my Product ID code took me to this forum question, and it seems that the architecture of my notebook is very likely to be incompatible with WIN 10 Creator's Update, since my product code is only 2 end digits different to the example in that thread.

So to all you others with this particular model of HP Laptop out there - be very careful if you are still only considering updating from Win 7 or 8 to Win 10.

Please don't do it unless your machine is listed here as having been checked and found to be compatible.

[Greg]

I've never had a HP laptop myself, but thanks for the warning Mouse!

A friend of mine had one (not the same as yours), and her Wacom tablet was always glitching out with it, though I know their drivers can be a bit iffy sometimes anyway so it might not have been completely the laptop's fault!

[Mouse]

If your friend's Wacom isn't working properly, then it is most likely to be the driver. Driver updates are available on the Wacom website, and if its not obvious which one is the one intended for her particular model, there's a very good live chat service. That's how I remedied my own Wacom problems.

I cannot speak for your friend, since you haven't said if this was related to the Creator's Update or not, but my own Wacom problems were actually caused by the Creator's Update corrupting my Wacom driver.

There are other drivers on my system which have also been damaged by the Creator's Update. I am still trying to track them down and uninstall/reinstall things as I go. It's not easy when there is more than one thing wrong to work out what exactly is being caused by what.

Needless to say - I have an extreeeeeeeeeeemly low opinion of Microsoft right now, and I'm not likely to forgive them. My next machine is quite likely to be a Mac.

[Falconius]

Ah, Microsoft, ever shooting its customers in the foot. Even if it wasn't a problem with other things the RAM issue is relevant, my system right now doing practically nothing, is using 3 GB of the stuff. Without the browser it's 'only' using 2.3. With only 4 GB that leaves very little room for an RAM intensive application (ie any visual creation app) to work with.

My Wacom was also affected by a windows update, I had to reinstall it from scratch (and even more annoyingly redo all the tablet settings because the backup save file of them was either corrupted or not compatible).

[Mouse]

Microsoft killed my laptop, but I shot myself in the foot when I attempted to free up wasted disc space to see if that would improve the situation (the disc was 3/4 full) and ended up accidentally cleaning up all the previous versions of Windows. So now I can't roll back to Win 8.1, which is what this machine was when I bought it.

I'm stuck with it now, and since my financial resources are extremely small I wont be wasting money increasing the RAM on this one. I'd rather add that money to the cost of buying a Mac.

Here is a partial list of the graphics apps I have and whether they have been affected by Creators Update:

GIMP - unstable/unusable for large files, and no longer works with Wacom pen dynamics
Krita - mind-numbingly slow and crashy, but still works well with pen dynamics
CC3+ - not affected, as far as I've used it only a couple of times since the update
Genetica - not affected
Sketchup - not affected
Blender - not affected
Vue - unusable

Other apps:

All browsers - variously unstable (including Edge)

[Tonnichiwa]

Oh man, I'm sorry to hear about this Sue. I hated having to switch to windows 10 because microsoft stopped supporting and licensing/producing Movie Maker, the program I was using to edit the video's I was making for my youtube channel. I've tried various other programs that are compatible with Windows 10 but most of them do stupid things like put a watermark on your video, or they are too complicated for what I want to do. I haven't been able to find anything good so I haven't been able to make any more videos.

Back when I used to build computers for a living, I used to HATE HP computers because they used to make all of their parts proprietary. This meant you had to buy any upgrade parts or replacement parts directly from them, not after market sellers. And of course they over priced their parts by quite a bit.

Hopefully you will be able to get your Mac soon so you can put all of this behind you.

[Falconius]

I haven't been able to find anything good so I haven't been able to make any more videos.

Have you tried using Lightworks? They used to have a free version (which if I recall limited the codecs and resolutions you could render to), not sure if they have that any more.

I'd rather add that money to the cost of buying a Mac.

I agree, it is a much better use of the money than buying RAM for the current machine.

[Tonnichiwa]

I looked into it but the free version didn't have some of the editing things I need, being able to record and upload to youtube in mp4 being one of them.

[Mouse]

Thanks Tony

That's seriously bad news about your videos. You were making a fine collection. I really hope you can find an alternative soon. Don't give up looking

I can still map - just about, but not as large scale as before. Everything takes such a looooooong time to do now, and I'm making so many cups of coffee waiting for save operations in Krita that I risk becoming a caffeine addict! LOL! Save takes up to 20 minutes, but I have to do it before I try anything really dangerous - like a drop shadow, a blur, or a gradient fill. I've had to switch autosave off. I discovered that autosave can tie things up for about 45 minutes. And I really do mean tie things up. All other apps that are open when a Krita autosave starts automatically crash, and you can't minimise Krita to do other stuff. It just sits there - apparently frozen. It does eventually do its job and come to an end. You've just got to be patient... and drink a helluva lot of coffee!

Although I've thought about it in the past I'm really glad now that I never took on any commissions. If I had any clients relying on me to get things done within a time limit right now I'd be in a horrible mess - letting people down all over the place.

[Tonnichiwa]

Coffee? And here I thought you brits only drank tea!

Thats what I used to hate about my old computer. It would do that whenever I tried to make a map larger than 6000 × 6000.