Then over the years my mental image gradually changed. HP printers weren't reliable workhorses over the complete product line anymore. Then the Windows drivers got bad. Then the inkjet cartridge bullshit. They effectively quit making calculators. Then Carly, then...and now I'm in your boat, where the HP label is equivalent to "made in China, and not the good China, the bad China that uses slave labor and cuts every corner it can find". I now actively avoid HP products.

Does anybody know why their test instruments division was spun off in the 90's? Was it to cut down on bureaucracy, or to "reinvent" the company for the digital age, or something else?

Profit, but no growth.

All the manufacturers of test equipment have the same issues: the number of people who need test equipment is effectively fixed and costs are mostly all customer support.

So, there is this gulf from the <$1000 category (no customer support--we have a forum, maybe, and it is probably in Chinese) to the >$25,000 category (okay, we make enough profit per sale to allocate a couple of hours of a real human to talk to you).

Agilent is HP's life science division (test equipment for biology folks) and the electronic test equipment division is now called keysight.

As far as I'm aware these two were spun out since the growth wasn't as good as the consumer electronics division.

Now we have an all-in-one HP printer/fax/scanner/copier that gets me closer to that scene in Office Space than any device I've ever owned. The obscenely overpriced cartridges don't last. It takes forever to warm up. The list goes on and I'll never own another HP product again.

To be fair, HP wasn't the only one that had that bug. My SWAG is that there was some common library that a lot of drivers used, including HP, that fiddled with the FPU and never set it back.

But, doesn't matter, it's long since been fixed regardless of who did or did not have the bug. :-)

I despise everything HP, but their lineup of laptops from the past year has been pretty good. I love my HP pavilion 15T power.

Got a 4GB GTX1050, HQ series i5 and an SSD in a laptop for ~$600. Hasn't given me any problems so far. my only complaint is the difficulty of getting the right drivers for Linux. But it worked eventually.