No support for dv7-1260us?

It's a pretty nice unit, 1440x900, dual core Turion, 4gig RAM, 500gig HD, BD-ROM/DVD-RW, HDMI, eSATA, ExpressCard, and for some reason a telephone modem.

In other words still good enough to run Windows 10 decently, better specs than some other laptops I've put 10 on.

The HP support site tells me "No software or drivers are available for this product with the selected operating system.". Apparently it's detecting I'm using a PC with Windows 10 because it never gives me a choice of selecting the OS, which is Vista. Clicking the product homepage link goes back to the main support page.

I want to get the latest BIOS and see what hardware is in it so I can find drivers for Windows 10, and whether or not Win 7 was available on it, but it looks like HP is determined nobody is going to be allowed to know diddly about this laptop.

Meanwhile, some companies, like STAR Micronics, still have everything available for pretty much everything they've ever made, including DOS and Windows 3.x software for 30 year old printers.

Looks like the next step is get the dust blown out then try HP's product detection from the laptop and see if HP still wants to blow me a raspberry. If there's no way to pry the info out of HP, them I shall forevermore, when asked "Should I buy an HP computer?" my answer shall be "Oh hell no!".

 

Looking at the HP Data Sheet that I quickly google'd up:
http://cdn.cnetcontent.com/56/6b/566ba5de-62fc-4e33-a362-71a82d99838b.pdf

The copyright text is from 2009.
I would not put it past any computer company to support a product today that is 10 years old; this is not isolated to HP itself either.
Windows Vista support also ended April 2017.
Another example - Apple who most tout for 'customer experience', does not support the iPhone 5 since iOS 11 in 2017. The iPhone 5 was released in 2012. This is 5 years in comparison.

The fact you can install Windows 10 does not entitle you for HP to support it. It is a very YMMV with these machines.
Having said that, Windows 10 will grab the drivers that it does know about once you are online - these are probably the best you will get at this point.

 

All HP would have to do is *leave things alone*. Leave the information and software available and let the owners of the hardware access and download. But instead HP has (again) gone to special effort and expense to take stuff away in an attempt to make it impossible for people to use their HP computers with the software they shipped with.

It's the same tired old "Pi$$ off! Buy our new stuff!" attitude that *hurts the company*. Look at the 'support depth' of Dell, STAR Micronics and other companies where you can still download the original software and manuals for some quite old equipment.

HP created a lot of ill will towards themselves in the 2000's when they did this with everything that shipped with Windows 98SE or older. It took some good "search-fu" to ferret out where in their FTP server they stashed things. Now they're doing it again with Windows 7 and older systems. At least they've kept things in FTP while being a bunch of arses on the web side.

I have found a 3rd party site that links to the BIOS drivers etc in HP's FTP server, so I can get what I need. I'll also be using Snappy Drivers.

 

although some of the links to those drivers for the HP dv7-1260us may end up being broken and not working later on. my cousin's old HP dv6648se entertainment notebook pc also had a similar fate where HP had removed the support/driver pages for that model late last year but was able to get all the necessary drivers before HP pulled them.