It was a background app and named something like system32.exe which I installed on my girlfriends computer.
The frustration she endured while trying to write an essay for school was next level. I faked trying to help her :D She eventually resorted to copy and pasting 'e' every time she needed one.
For the record, 18 years later she's my wife so she did eventually see the humor in it.
When I then had to use their web-based console to do some administration, I quickly discovered I couldn’t type a “.”, then discovered that many other symbols also didn’t seem to work at this console.
Based on the password, it appears their solution is to simply work around the problem rather than fix it :(((((. Pretty shocking state of affairs for 2023.
Frankly I'm amazed that the reply, despite smelling of useless first-line tech support by wasting an entire paragraph to repeat his question pretty much verbatim, managed to actually offer a useful suggestion of testing with an external keyboard.
Yet, it is on top of HN (: Humans are interesting!
So much bullshit in one paragraph, why aren't they trained to type like human beings?
Consider that a lot of the support requests come as stream of consciousness posts with typos and no punctuation, written quickly and in anger. This issue could've been "new laptip does not take password. Its correct many times, want my many back" (I'm not joking, I've seen worse) - rephrasing and asking for the missing details can be super helpful there.
See a random selection from the first page of posts for why you'd want to verify you understood the customer: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Software-and-How-To-Q... , https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Software-and-How-To-Q... , https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Software-and-How-To-Q...
Applying this practice everywhere instead of "where needed" reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling
> So much bullshit in one paragraph, why aren't they trained to type like human beings?
I'm pretty sure this is because most of the message is copy pasted and they just have a line here and there where they need to reword the users' issue to pretend its personnal.
Do let me know if you require any further help on this. Will be glad to help you.
While I'm not particularly impressed with the response either, especially repeating what the customer said back to them like that somehow makes the customer believe you actually understood the problem, the rest is kind of mandatory to set a professional tone so that emotions don't get involved so quickly.
If their OKR was instead product improvement to delight all future customers, say, then the response would have been "oh shit that sounds like an OS issue, let me get some engineers on this."
Perhaps some manager at HP "addressed" their customer support misunderstanding users by instituting a rule like this.
Never ever again would I buy HP equipment.
if (password[0] == ‘p’) {
return -1;
}if (password[0] == "Password") return -1; if (password[0] == "password") return -1; ...
This led me down a rabbit hole to first set up a virtual SSID (which worked but impacted apparent throughput), and then a separate AP for low-bandwidth IoT devices.
I don’t have the time in my life to raise enough clout to get this addressed.
Turns out this was a known issue and there was a bios update which specifically fixed it. https://forums.tomsguide.com/threads/f-keys-activate-from-ty...
Found it: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/keylogger-fou...
> This file is registered to start via a Scheduled Task every time the user logs into his computer. According to modzero researchers, the file "monitors all keystrokes made by the user to capture and react to functions such as microphone mute/unmute keys/hotkeys."
I was in support at the time and can confirm 1-2-1 recording of all keystrokes to the file mentioned, utterly baffling.