AFTER sticking its fingers in its ears and going la-la-la really loudly, HP has finally admitted that there are problems with the built-in Wi-fi on its 6000 and 9000 series Pavilion notebooks.

For a while the HP forum, here, has been all a-buzz with problems about the lappies' Wi-fis not working. The wireless card detected the network with all the efficiency of a blind person trying to find a black cat in a dark room that was not there.

However there had not been a dicky bird from HP until hacks at ZDNet wrote an attack on the outfit for ignoring its users.

Now it seems that someone from HP Total Care has logged on to say that HP has a BIOS update and some instructions on getting this resolved.

The spokesHP seemed to think that the problem only hurt those with AMD machines running Vista.

Readers of the forum also seemed to treat HP's advice with a large dose of mock. For a start the fault effected XP users and it was not a driver problem as fresh installs of the OS don’t resolve it. It appears it cannot be a Wi-fi card fault because those who replaced it found that it still does not work. Others who tried HP's new Bios update found it hopeless too.

In fact, the only cure that anyone has found that worked with 100 per cent certainty was to replace the motherboard or get a new computer.