Jeff writes:

> To repeat a piece of a post a few days ago:
>
>  > I found a driver for the HP keyboard that disabled the pinging at
>  > www.netropa.com and they have drivers listed for many different
>  > manufacturers. I don't know if the pinging was limited to the HP
>  > drivers or not but the file I downloaded and used to fix the problem
>  > was hp2506gn.zip.
>
>  So there is at least a fix for the keyboard driver.  As for any other
>  quirks that are likely pre-installed in HP PCs, I'd follow Wirt's advice
>  of reinstalling Windows cleanly before you install too much of
>  your own customized software that you may [not] be able to reinstall.

I was thinking just a few minutes before Jeff's post arrived about the stark
contrasts in an HP that would resort to this sort of behavior and the HP that
was run by Bill & Dave.

I wrote on Friday, following the announcement of William Hewlett's death,
"Bill Hewlett and David Packard really did make a difference with their
lives. "The HP Way" is no joke, nor is it merely a marketing slogan. It has
represented a business culture of honesty and decency and integrity to the
point that everyone who grew up in it, or who was even mildly associated with
it, attempts to emulate."

There's nothing honest or decent or integriful about the form of deception
that HP is currently engaging in with these dial-back,
report-on-your-behavior PCs. I can be almost certain that Bill & Dave would
never have agreed to having this sort of behavior associated with their
company. Indeed, I can be almost as certain that during their primacy of
their tenure at the helm of HP, if they discovered that someone in the
organization had authorized this sort of deception, they would have tracked
back to the person in highest authority who made that decision, even it had
been at Carly's level, and dismissed them immediately -- and then profoundly
apologized to the customers who were affected.

I can remember several instances of somewhat similar conduct, and that was
precisely the immediate response at the time.

In the end, this sort of conduct does no one any good, most especially HP. I
certainly won't buy HP PCs any more. Rather, I now tend to buy only Dells and
IBMs, organizations I still trust to be delievering to me honest machines. On
the other hand, can you imagine the furor that would erupt if it were
discovered that Microsoft was engaging in this behavior, having every copy of
Windows dial back and report on your behavior? HP should be held to no less a
standard -- and a class action lawsuit is not necessarily out of the question.

Wirt Atmar