HP QuickWeb, Singular And Pointless | Gekk

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HP QuickWeb, Singular And Pointless

Please note: I wrote this as an "infotainment" post for social media, and thus it is written with a substantially spicier style than most of my website. I felt that this topic is sufficiently absurd that removing the cussing took the punch out of it; I was genuinely going feral as I performed the research for this article, and it's reflected in my narration. You've been warned.

When researching Phoenix Hyperspace for my highly upsetting article on the subject, it was hard to avoid news articles proclaiming that it had been sold off by Phoenix (when they gave up wholesale on their idea of making anything other than BIOSes) and bought up by HP. However, that's where the trail ended; attempts to find out what, if anything, HP had done with it proved fruitless. That is, until two days ago.

In Summary

When researching an only tangentially related subject (the Dell Latitude Z600, which runs a completely different instant-on linux) I stumbled across a mention of HP QuickWeb, described as another fast-booting Linux distro. Digging into this, I uncovered quite a shocking amount of information I had managed to miss before, on account of there being no standardized terminology for any of this stuff.

The discovery process on all of this happened so quickly that I don't really want to drag it out the way I did in the previous article. Once I knew the terminology, it took me maybe six hours to make it from beginning to end. The journey is less important than the destination in this leg of the story, so let me just summarize much of it, broken up into Important Data Nodes:

HP did in fact buy Hyperspace in late 2009 - but they didn't do anything with it right away.

Prior to the acquisition, they already had an instant-on Linux - one based on Splashtop, under the name QuickWeb.

It's amazing that I missed this, because they sold it across their whole range for several years. Netbooks (Mini 210), consumer machines (Envy 13/14), business (Probook 4730s, 4530s, 4430s), executive (Elitebook 8540w, 8440p) - and these are just some examples. There were many more. I was able to walk into RePC the day after I learned about this and walk out with two machines that support it, that's how common it was.

Laptops with QuickWeb support have a little button with a globe icon that boots QuickWeb instead of your normal OS. Note that not all HPs with globe buttons can do it; on some, that button just opens a web browser within Windows. There is no way to tell which is which. For instance, the Elitebook 8460 and 8470 look exactly identical, but only the former supports QuickWeb.

A couple years after the acquisition (AFAICT) HP finally decided to do something with Hyperspace: They quietly replaced the existing QuickWeb with one based on Hyperspace, with no fanfare or announcement of any kind. I can find no information linking the two - the only way I was able to prove this was by downloading two revisions of QuickWeb, extracting them, and finding strings for Splashtop in one and Hyperspace in the other.

As with the other Hyperspace (and Splashtop) implementations I showed in previous articles, the actual OS is completly uninteresting. In fact, it doesn't even have the unholy host filesystem access feature, or the office suite, or the ability to save files at all. It's simply a web browser, Skype, an email client, and some news and stonks widgets.

Additionally, HP did not base their implementation on Hyperspace Hybrid or Dual. It's the very basic version: a fast-boot Linux that dual-boots with Windows.

It is not, however, a conventional MBR-type dual-boot setup, nor is it using Phoenix's wacky hidden BEER partition table nonsense. Instead, the OS is simply stored as files on a FAT32 partition called HP_TOOLS; it's not even hidden, the user can see it in Windows.

Since this era of HP laptop had early UEFI, and UEFI can read FAT32, they used custom firmware code to just look for a partition with that specific name, then it finds "HP_TOOLS\QuickWeb\QuickWeb.efi" and boot it. EFI is a big step in making the PC more boring (good meaning)

Okay, let's have some pictures.

This is the "globe" button. As noted, it doesn't mean a machine definitely has QuickWeb.

This is Quickweb - specifically, a version I haven't yet been able to locate. This is from an old blog post. It's obviously Splashtop-based, since it's clearly branded in the screenshot, but it seems to be much closer to the original offering, with a widget based "desktop" and a number of bundled apps including Skype, chat, email, music and a photo viewer. I found a couple other screenshots that make it clear that the latter two apps are still the terrible Adobe Flash crap that they were selling in 2009.

I have seen references in HPs docs to QuickWeb version numbers, but no clear rubric. I suspect that this version is "QuickWeb 1," the next one is "QuickWeb 2", and the Hyperspace...