I have found that on my machines, they provide a means to disable the security check and allow the downgrade anyway.

This is a real issue though, there is the risk of failure during the procedure, less so than it once was, but then the risk that the update actually performs worse than the previous version.

The latter I don't know how we resolve.

> I have found that on my machines, they provide a means to disable the security check and allow the downgrade anyway.

I was usually able to this, and my other HP machines propose to do a BIOS downgrade. But in this particular case I haven't managed to do a rollback, even with a "BIOS recovery", whatever that is.

That's unfortunate. Does your company buy a lot of these?

Perhaps they can get in touch with your supplier to pass a complaint about the poor update so they might be able to pass it on to their devs and hopefully fix the issue?

We only buy HP PCs, but we don't have a relationship with them (we go through a middleman). And also, this particular model is not common for us, I chose it for the Zen 3 CPU and upgradability. The usual PCs are the basic Intel i5 du jour, so I can't compare notes with other people. I'm also pretty much the only one doing firmware upgrades with any regularity.

The middleman would be your supplier in this case. It's possible they have enough of a relationship with HP to escalate the issue with them.

I would try have your org reach out to the middleman and see what they can do, suppliers, resellers and partners etc can be quite helpful in encouraging manufacturers to pay attention.

Enable quick boot

Haven't seen any "quick" boot. There's a "fast" one, though, but toggling it doesn't do anything in this case.