Re: I slapped a wireless card into an HP laptop...
Many, many moons ago I was called in to assist a Very Senior Person with his company-paid-for Really Powerful Workstation. This was a massive HP tower, with lots of RAM, multiple SATA 3 drives (back when large-capacity SATA 3 drives were hideously expensive) and multiple monitors. It was the monitors which were the problem. The system would handle three 24” monitors, one on the motherboard DVI port, two on the video card, but the Very Senior Person wanted _four_ monitors, all of them 30”. (Exactly what he was doing was a mystery, at least to me, but he wanted four 30” monitors. I suspect an awful lot of Call of Duty, but I have a negative attitude.) He got two high-end gaming video cards and installed them and plugged all four monitors in. And got 800x600 on monitors rated for over 1920x1080. Reinstalling the drivers got 1920x1080, until he rebooted to finish the beta install, whereupon it went back to 800x600.
I had a look, and checked the hardware. It was working elsewhere. I checked if Windows was set up properly; it was. I RTFM. And lo! Hidden away in the docs was a list of ‘supported video cards’, a list which did NOT include the supercards he had got, with a notation that non-supported cards ‘might not deliver proper performance’. We ordered cards off the list. No more problems, but the HP video cards lacked the performance of the gaming cards but cost considerably more. The Very Senior Person made a notation of his own, and the company stopped buying HP equipment. HP’s sales guy noticed after a while and came around to find out why. I told him. We had been good for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales over a year. HP lost all that because they played silly buggers with video cards.
We still have HP printers from the days before The Great Video Card Incident. For several reasons they’re being replaced by Brothers as they die. All HP desktop and laptop equipment is long gone, we bought a lot of Macs and generic hand built systems instead, the Macs in particular costing more than the HPs, but but Apple didn’t attempt the kind of nonsense HP did.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
