I recently purchased this OMEN by HP. I picked this particular model because I saw that some of the other models had an issue where the PC would go to sleep and not wake back up. As much as I tried to avoid it, I ended up experiencing those very same sleep issues on this computer.

If you manually put the computer to sleep or allow it to go to sleep on its own, it simply will not wake back up. The fan will start to spin, the light will stay on, and no matter what you do it won’t respond. You actually have to pull out the power cable to get it to restart. It’s really frustrating.

I tried updating everything that I found on my own, but nothing worked. I even had HP support remote in and install a BIOS update along with some other changes. After that, the computer would never go to sleep at all, no matter what. So the choices ended up being either an eternal sleep or none at all.

Next, they offered to send me a flash drive to restore the factory settings. I mentioned that I was fairly technical and could download the image to a thumb drive if they provided the source. So they had me download the HP Cloud Recovery Tool to rebuild the computer with a new image.

I really didn’t want to do this after spending a full weekend installing and configuring all the apps and settings. But the tech assured me that performing a full wipe and rebuild would resolve the issue. I was apprehensive but after asking several times if they believed it would actually fix the problem and not waste more of my time, I performed the rebuild.

As I suspected, the rebuild didn’t resolve the issue. In fact, it put me right back to square one. After going to sleep, the computer won’t turn back on and the fan goes crazy. This literally put me right back to where I started.

The next response was to request that I return the computer to the vendor. I wasn’t upset at the tech; he was just following the script provided by HP. But I do wish they hadn’t asked me to spend so many hours on troubleshooting steps that didn’t help. If this is a known issue, it would be better to go straight to “return it” or for HP to stop selling devices with this problem.

I thought this model would not have such issues, so I took a chance. But here we are. At this point, I decided to return the computer to Best Buy. Honestly, it’s not reasonable that I should be reinstalling, troubleshooting, and spending so many hours trying to fix a brand new computer. This experience has been very disappointing, and I would strongly recommend considering other products.