HP have done this before. They yanked all of their 1990s stuff offline some years ago. Meanwhile Dell still supports their machines from that era.

Well, they do still have *some* 1990s stuff.. oddly none of their 90s presario laptop lines survived but the Conturas are there. There's still absolutely nothing for DEC x86 desktops.

I actually heard about this move a couple years ago, originally it only affected the consumer lineups (Presarios and Pavilions), but since you've noticed that they're taking down drivers for your EVO N610C laptop, I imagine it won't be too long until the business lineup models get their pages removed.

Good thing I downloaded every available driver for my HP e-Vectra when I had the chance to.

However, I do have a few other HP machines that either I've yet to download drivers for (HP DC7800 and HP Pavilion dv6930us) or I have their drivers on various driver CDs from the past (Compaq EVO D510 e-PC). They all use the standard Intel chipset for everything (sound, video, NIC, chipset, you name it), so even if HP pulls the plug on drivers for those three systems, I can source the drivers from Intel's website which still has drivers for pretty much everything with their name on it.

Someone should upload as many old HP drivers as possible to some other website (i.e. VOGONS Driver Library) just to be safe.

The files are still on their FTP site. It's just the webpages that have been taken down:

ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/

They took them down sometime last year. I recall being able to download drivers for a Pentium era HP Vectra sometime in late 2016/early 2017.

yeh its ashame most companies are doing this.
But I lost all respect from HP when they announced you cant download BIOS updates unless its covered by a valid warranty.

I'm ok with existing hardware, but newly acquired hardware down the track will become a drag.

I already have the old Compaq FTP server archive (from the Internet Archive) on my web server, which has some stuff the current HP FTP server is missing; this includes a later Compaq Computer Setup Disk ver. 2.01 Rev J pack for Armada portables (SoftPaq 9962); the latest on HP's server is ver. 2.01 Rev H. Amusingly, only the HP server had most of the very early SoftPaq stuff that the former Compaq server didn't, so I grabbed those as well. The manuals had to have been somewhere else; they don't seem to be obvious on HP's FTP server. It's jarring. [The old Compaq server was actually online through an IP address until mid July 2017; HP likely yanked it then.]

The HP stuff is an extremely low priority for me, however. I only have one 2TB htdocs drive in my server, and my old 1TB transfer drive is dying. Not exactly in the spec of vintage/retro stuff, but in the future, someone would have to grab the much later SoftPaqs starting with 39001 (and probably a few other directories as well, who knows). Though, I'm not sure if any later BIOSes made it there; the earlier ones likely did.

Honestly, after owning a laptop model infamous for the nVidia video/chipset failure (tx1200 series), I never personally owned another HP laptop since. Most of my laptops were Dell and Toshiba models.

--

This reminds me: Intel yanked a lot of old Tech Notes and lots of other vintage info after revamping their website. Thankfully, they were archived in June 2014. The BIOS files aren't present in the FTP archive; did notice they still had some of them on their site last I checked.

Do you have any Compaq Presario 5000 drivers?

oeuvre wrote:

Do you have any Compaq Presario 5000 drivers?

Quite likely, but actually looking through the SoftPaq directories is painful. Doesn't help this part of the site is not search engine indexed (yet). I did check a few (random) files regarding the Presario against the allfiles.txt, and they do exist so far. This excludes the very early SoftPaqs, though HP inexplicably saved those on their current FTP server. I have linked the allfiles.txt file, since I'm not sure of the filesize limit here.

It's a home server as well; running since December 2005. Of course, upgraded through the years.
http://cwcyrix.duckdns.org/ftp-archives/ftp.c … om/pub/softpaq/ - Compaq SoftPaqs and some HP files all the way to SP33499. Quite a few 0000-2000 and a lesser 2001-2500 are missing.
http://cwcyrix.duckdns.org/ftp-archives/compa … ra/pub/softpaq/ - Supplemental early Compaq SoftPaqs from current ftp.hp.com server. Still, some 1001-2500 are missing, but 0000-1000 are fine, barring SoftPaq .txt files.
http://cwcyrix.duckdns.org/ftp-archives/ftp.c … aq/allfiles.txt - (most) All Files listed up to SP22703

Aha, wow thanks! I did find the drivers for mine a while ago but it's becoming increasingly more difficult to find drivers for even P3/Duron/Athlon era systems. Archive.org has saved me many times though, at least in terms of finding the file name.

Myself wrote:

However, I do have a few other HP machines that either I've yet to download drivers for (HP DC7800 and HP Pavilion dv6930us)... They all use the standard Intel chipset for everything (sound, video, NIC, chipset, you name it), so even if HP pulls the plug on drivers for those three systems, I can source the drivers from Intel's website which still has drivers for pretty much everything with their name on it.

And just now I've gotten around to downloading as many drivers as possible for my HP Pavilion dv6930us laptop (surprisingly HP has yet to take down the support page for that specific model, although most of the dv6xxx models have had their support pages nuked). Because that model has drivers available for Windows Vista only, I've had to source compatible XP drivers elsewhere, now all I need is an F6 AHCI driver floppy disk image for the ICH8M chipset and I'll be all set.

Later, I'll download Windows XP and Vista drivers for my HP DC7800 (no drivers needed for Windows 7+ since those versions have the drivers built in).

I feel like, it is time for some human being doing a massive backup of those drivers and pages, perhaps archive.org or a more private measure to save it. From being lost forever.