How to find the link to HP Drivers and Support for retired products

how-to-find-HP-retired-product-support-page.md

If you go to the HP support site

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/desktops

And enter the serial number of your retired HP device, it will respond with an error message saying that your product is retired and that they don't provide drivers and manuals any more.

HP policy for products no longer supported HP Support may vary by product. Once a product is retired, the official HP support content (troubleshooting articles, user guides, how-to videos, etc.) for that product is removed from the HP web site. Additional support content may still be available via the HP Forums or from third-party web sites; however, HP takes no responsibility for content authored by third-parties.

Here's the trick to bypass this and get to the page containing the drivers and manuals.

Determine the productNameOid of your HP product

In your browser, open your development tools so you can see all of the network calls made by the web page.

Enter your products serial number in the search bar and hit enter.

The network calls listed in the developer tools will show a few different calls. One of those calls will be an HTTP POST to this URL

https://support.hp.com/wcc-services/pdp/us-en/offers?pageId=retiredproductmodal&authState=anonymous&template=retiredproductmodal

The request data being POSTed will contain a JSON blob that looks like this

{
    "requestId": "1729368621663ksztEa5",
    "products":
    [
        {
            "modelNumber": "WW636AA",
            "serialNumber": "4CE0200552",
            "productSeriesOid": "4162263",
            "productNameOid": "4224849",
            "warranty":
            {}
        }
    ]
}

Somehow, the HP website has some ability to convert a serial number into a "productNameOid" which is the internal ID number used for that product. We'll need this later.

Find a support page and swap in the productNameOid

I then went to Google and searched for the general class of product (in my case "hp pavilion 6000 desktop drivers site:support.hp.com") which brought up a search result on the HP support site for a product that wasn't the exact one I was looking for (in my case "HP Pavilion p6340f Desktop").

I navigated to that support page

https://support.hp.com/ph-en/drivers/hp-pavilion-p6000-desktop-pc-series/model/4120191

then took the "productNameOid" I'd gotten from the JSON blob above and replaced the last number in the URL with that ID number

This changed the URL to

https://support.hp.com/ph-en/drivers/hp-pavilion-p6000-desktop-pc-series/model/4224849

Which is the support page for the specific model and serial number of my product