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#21
I have some reasonable guesses about this.
It appears that the BIOS update feature is a Windows feature implemented with a device driver provided by the OEM. It also seems to have been around for several years now. When Windows is installed the installer will check the hardware and BIOS identification and check if it has an appropriate firmware driver. If present it will be installed and the appropriate entries added to Device Manager. The OEM could add, remove, or change the feature whenever there is a Windows update. I suspect this would normally only happen with a feature update.
Other than the functions of the driver this is pretty much how drivers have worked since the beginning of the NT platform in 1993.
This is what shows on my laptop, I did get a notice a couple of days ago that there were updates for my machine but they were from HP support. There were 5 altogether but 1 was for a BIOS update and there was a Firmware one as well and a Bluetooth one.
I've not actually installed any of them so far but I've just taken a snip from Device Manager.
I also had the coincidence of both having the same version number for about four months last year.
You could wait until
- your next bios update to find out that the firmware version stays the same whilst the bios version changes, or
- your next HP hardware driver update of something with a name like 'HP system firmware' to find out that the firmware version changes whilst the bios version stays the same.
Denis