We don't have a definite confirmation on this yet, but one blogger's raising a whole lot of ruckus because apparently his HP laptop's BIOS has a mini-PCI card whitelist—upgrade the card with a non-HP-approved device, and your laptop won't boot. So yes, that means not only is HP probably making dough on the side by selling vendors the right to use their cards in an otherwise open architecture, but upgrades sold after the fact simply won't work (unless HP updates that white-list, and what do you think the odds of that are?). And now we're hearing some IBM laptops apparently rock the same trick. Seriously, what kinds of companies would have the guts to challenge their consumers to this kind of showdown? Is HP trying to publicly hemorrhage consumers?

[Via BoingBoing]