Hi all,
Does anyone have any experience with the HP system utilities on the EliteBook line of laptops? In particular, I am wondering how accessible HP's system management utilities (for, say, adjusting power settings) are with JAWS. I am in need of a new laptop and was able to find a good deal on an HP EliteBook 840 G10, but having inaccessible system utilities would definitely influence my purchasing decision. One of the things I really liked about my previous Latitude was how accessible all of the Dell utilities are, so I really don't want to go backwards in this regard if I don't have to.
Thanks for any help,
Michael
Comments
HP
Hi,
I do not have an eliteBook, but I do have a HP laptop. All of the applications that came pre-installed, that were from HP, all seem to work just fine with NVDA. Some of the HP stuff includes System Event Utility, HP Audio Center, HP QuickDrop (which is no longer supported), HP Privacy Settings, and HP Smart (for Printers).
Again all of these work with NVDA.
HTH.
Not accessible
I haven't found any of them to be accessible at all.
However, I have found that the quality of HP's telephone support consistently increases significantly when I mention that I'm blind and can't perform the troubleshooting steps they've asked me to take.
I'd recommend lenovo.
I have a HP laptop but I used to have a lenovo all in one pc and the software it came with was very accessible as far as I remember.
Honestly, i'd get rid of all that hp software and just use the windows setingos for power management but that's just me.
Brad has a point
Hi Michael,
I uninstalled most of my HP software the first day I got my laptop. My sound card was doing that stupid thing of making NVDA or JAWS cut off at the end of sentences, so I uninstalled Microsoft automated power manager, and made sure my power mode was set to best performance under the power and battery settings. I also didn't like the fact the function keys weren't function keys by default, they were set to media controls and other stuff, so I used PowerShell scripts to go into the bios and change the function key behaviour. Apparently on some machines you can press the function key plus Escape to change this, but it didn't work on this laptop. So what I'm saying is, you probably won't even need all that HP stuff unless there's something really specific you want to change. I've been using Windows for years, and I've only ever kept the manufacturers' drivers, printing and audio stuff.
HP support
I work in IT support for my employer and we use these laptop for all of our employees. As a blind person in IT support, trust me, having something that is accessible is a big plus, especially if I will need to provide support for it.
While the tools are not very friendly, HP support is very, very, helpful, especially if your system is still covered under warranty.
Thanks and Some Follow-Up Questions
Thank you everyone for your answers on this. I have some follow-up questions:
I am coming from a Dell Latitude, where I was able to customize a lot through the Dell utilities. In particular, I was able to adjust system performance and battery settings. For eample, I was able to set up a charging profile to not charge my battery past 55% if I knew I was going to keep the system primarily plugged into AC power for an extended period of time, and thereby hopefully extend the life of the battery. I really got to liking this and am less than excited about potentially not having these type of options easily available So this leads me to my question. While I know that regulating how far the battery can charge probably isn't something readily available in Windows, how about performance management? Prior to my Dell Latitude, I had a Lenovo ThinkPad and while it was good enough, the sound card went to sleep constantly (thereby cutting off JAWS audio) and I could never stop this. To try and solve that problem, I set the system to a higher performance setting, but battery life took a hit as a result. While the construction of the Latitude wasn't as great, I at least did not have any of these problems with the sound card. The reason I am not wanting to go with a Latitude this time is because of the superior durability of the EliteBook.
So, going back to my original question. Does anyone know if the HP utilities would offer me anything related to control of performance, power management, and audio that I couldn't accomplish through Windows itself? Or are these utilities just overlays to the standard Windows interface.
Thanks again for all your help!
I found something that may help you
Below is a link to an article regarding a couple of features at HP laptops have in regards to battery life.
https://www.xda-developers.com/how-limit-battery-charge-80-percent-windows-11/
You should be able to change the power plan.
If you type power plan into the windows start menu, and press enter then tab to change plan settings for the, name of plan settings, it's all the way at the end of the options, past the part that describes what a power plan is,, then press enter on that and then tab and press enter on change advanced settings; you should be able to arrow down through the treeview to see if there are any items there that relate to battery settings.
Yeah, I have an hp too and…
Yeah, I have an hp too and... well I have a terrible experience with their battery replacement from factory, but the point is that the stock hp apps are not that bad in terms of accessibility although I also got rid of them, and for battery management windows own utilities are good enough. I had bad experience with toshiba/dynabook tools back then. I'd admit though that being able to limit the chargin on windows seems a cool idea as I haven't found a way to do this natively. On the mac by the way mhaeuser/Battery-Toolkit on github is the most accessible and efficient tool I've found to do that, owners of apple silicon should all use that in my opinion. even between 20-80% you actually have plenty of room and when you need more power you can completely charge it to full with just one click and touch id to confirm.
Utilities
I kept a couple of things from the laundry list of bloatware that came with my HP. Mainly, Audio Center and myHP. The first because I actually like the audio profiles, and the latter because it gives me a nice universal hot key for muting my microphone when I am in Zoom/Teams/WebEx meetings. Aside from my last post with the link to accessing battery functions in the bios, there is likely a 3rd-party utility somewhere out there in the ether.
On the zbook 14 I am sure…
On the zbook 14 I am sure that there are some unused buttons on my keaboard made exactly for that. I'll try to find these again and hope they work on my model. Thanks for the tip.
Thank you All
Thank you everyone for your responses on this! I think if I go Windows (which I probably will), it will be the HP EliteBook 840 G10 and I'll make the best of it.
The devil's advocate
I would say go windows. I am, of course, heavily biased. I have been a Mac user for the last decade or so of my life, up until March of this year, when my VR counselor purchased an HP laptop for me for schoolwork. This laptop is running Windows 11, has a terabyte of physical storage, an additional terabyte of online storage, and 16 GB of RAM, and it's quite possibly the best laptop I have ever used. Ever.
Oh, and with the latest NVDA plus specific add-ons, I do not even have a fraction of the accessibility issues, that I am seeing posted on the main AppleVis forums.
So yeah, go Elitebook. 😎✌️