Honor PC Helper — HONOR MagicBook hardware control for Windows

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Honor PC Helper controls HONOR laptop hardware from the Windows tray: battery charge limit, keyboard backlight, performance mode, touchpad haptics and edge gestures, the microphone and camera function keys, and driver updates from HONOR's catalogs. It drives the HONOR BIOS WMI interface directly, so HONOR PC Manager does not have to be installed or running.

One portable .exe (~49 MB, self-contained): no installer, no service, no telemetry. The only background network request is the app's own update check against GitHub Releases — 2 minutes after start, then every 6 hours. HONOR's driver catalogs are queried only while Drivers is open.

Hovering the tray icon shows the live state: mode, backlight level, charge range, charge/discharge power in watts, CPU and battery temperature, both fan speeds. Sensors are polled at most once every 5 seconds and only while the pointer is on the icon.

F7 mutes and unmutes the default recording device — the same mute Windows sound settings show — and sets the LED in the key to match. The LED follows a mute made anywhere else, such as from the volume mixer, and is restored at startup and after wake.

F8 turns the camera off and on and raises a system notification with the new state. The device stays connected and the switch works mid-call: apps receive a black frame. The state survives a reboot. The first press may ask for administrator rights once.

Fn+P switches performance mode — the same switch as the tray menu item.

Backlight level, haptics and edge gestures are reapplied after resume (including modern standby) and after the touchpad reconnects. The charge limit is checked after resume as well, and the chosen range is written back when the EC has dropped it.

Interface language follows the Windows display language: English, Russian, Simplified Chinese.

• Windows 10 or 11, x64
• A HONOR laptop that exposes the HONOR BIOS WMI interface (OemWMIMethod in root\WMI) — the MagicBook family ships with it
• No .NET runtime: the release build is self-contained
• HONOR PC Manager does not have to be installed or running

Developed and verified on a HONOR MagicBook Pro 14 2026 (ZQC-P, BIOS 1.10, Windows 11 26200). The available features depend on the machine and the BIOS: touchpad haptics and edge gestures exist only on force-pad models, some machines expose fewer sensors. Anything the firmware does not answer is hidden from the menu.

1. Download HonorPCHelper.exe from the latest release.
2. Run it — no installation, no dependencies. The icon appears in the system tray.
3. Left-click or right-click the icon to open the menu.

Hardware commands go through a Task Scheduler task named Honor PC Helper Privileged Hardware, which runs this same exe as the current user with the highest privileges and applies one pending command. The task is created the first time you change a hardware setting — that is the one and only UAC prompt. From then on every change, including sensor reads, goes through the task without elevation.

The left-edge brightness gesture additionally needs a one-time permission on the ACPI-WMI data block abbc0f5b-8ea1-11d1-a000-c90629100000 (HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WMI\Security). The privileged task grants it to your account on first use; until then brightness falls back to WmiSetBrightness, which changes brightness in 3% steps without the Windows OSD.

Drivers in the tray menu opens a window with the BIOS version and the driver and software list. The device inventory is built at startup in the background, so the list is already populated when you open it.

• The machine is matched against HONOR's catalogs by BIOS DeviceTypeEx/CVersion, board and product identifiers, CPU model and memory size.
• Packages come from HONOR's update platform (update.platform.hihonorcloud.com) and, as a fallback, from the official support catalogs (selfservice-ap/eu/cn.honor.com). Links that answer 404/410 are dropped.
• Green means the installed version matches the offered one, red means an update, grey means the local version could not be determined. A version counts as an update only when both numbers are comparable.
• Clicking a version downloads the package, verifies it and asks where to save it: SHA-256 when the server publishes one, Authenticode signature on every .exe, and an Honor/Huawei publisher when the file did not come from an official HONOR host. Archives are unpacked with path-traversal protection.
• The installer is never started for you. You get a verified file and decide whether to run it.
• Driver export and import. The buttons in the list header save every third-party driver in the system to a single zip (pnputil /export-driver) and put them back from such an archive or from a single .inf (pnputil /add-driver … /subdirs /install). Both run in a child process elevated once per operation through UAC; after an import the list is rebuilt, and a required restart is reported separately.

The same window shows the Honor PC Helper version and offers the update when a newer release exists.

The app checks GitHub Releases in the background — 2 minutes after start, then every 6 hours — and whenever the Drivers window is open. While a newer version is available, a red dot sits in the top-right corner of the tray icon and an Update to … item appears in the menu; it opens the Drivers window and starts the install.

The update is downloaded, then checked against the release asset size, the sha256 digest published by GitHub, the PE header and the version resource. The running exe is renamed aside, the new build takes its place and starts as the ordinary user process — no administrator prompt, unless the exe lives in a write-protected folder such as Program Files. If anything fails, the previous build is put back. Leftovers are removed at the next start.

Charge thresholds and the backlight timeout are stored by the firmware itself, not by this app.

Without arguments the app runs as a tray icon.

Exit codes: 0 success, 1 failure, 2 the argument value was not understood.

Some menu items are missing. Those features are not exposed by your BIOS or your touchpad.

A setting does not apply. Look at %LocalAppData%\HonorPCHelper\HonorPCHelper.log; every rejected BIOS command is logged with its error code. If the privileged task was deleted or the exe was moved, the next change re-registers it with one UAC prompt.

Fn+P is not reflected in the menu. The app listens to OemWMIEvent; if the WMI event subscription could not start, the reason is in the log.

F7 or F8 does nothing. They ride on the same OemWMIEvent subscription as Fn+P, so check the log for that first. The event codes are 0x287 (microphone) and 0x288 (camera) on a MagicBook Pro 14; if yours sends something else, open an issue with the codes your machine reports.

F8 shows the notification but the camera keeps filming. The model ships a camera without the Device MFT that reads CameraStatus. Open an issue with the laptop model and the camera's device ID from Device Manager.

The brightness edge swipe changes brightness but shows no OSD. The ACPI-WMI permission has not been granted yet — change any hardware setting once so the privileged task exists, then swipe again.

The driver check reports nothing. The app ignores the system proxy, but a firewall can still block hihonorcloud.com and honor.com.

1. Untick Start with Windows, then Exit.
2. From an elevated prompt: HonorPCHelper.exe --uninstall-privileged-tasks.
3. Delete HKCU\Software\HonorPCHelper, %LocalAppData%\HonorPCHelper and the exe.

Set the charge limit to Disabled before removing the app if you want the battery to charge to 100% again — the thresholds live in the EC and stay there.

Requires the .NET 10 SDK:

.\build.ps1

The result is a single self-contained, compressed dist\HonorPCHelper.exe.

Honor PC Helper is free, open source, and carries no ads or telemetry. If it saved you from installing HONOR PC Manager, you can support further development — any amount helps, and there is no obligation.

Not affiliated with, endorsed by or supported by HONOR. HONOR and MagicBook are trademarks of their respective owners.