*HP EliteBook 8560p Owners Lounge!*

Great to hear about the screen - what a relief for a lot of people. As for drivers, my Elitebooks of recrent years have a lways been factry loaded with an HP Software setup program in the All Programs list and it has several modules to pick and choose both drivvers and software, latest versions - or was that what you found inconvemient compared to Dell?

Thanks again for the moral support. Looking forward to your review.

Best, Jeff

 

Well as you know I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 when I swapped my HDD for a SSD. I was able to locate the software/drivers folder on the original harddrive but it was just a huge folder and the names were meaningless. I had no clue what i was installing and what actually needed to be installed. I ended up going to the web and downloading the drivers from HP.com since it offered some description but even then there was like 4 wireless card drivers. I dont know if Dell still does this but my old dell came with a drivers CD and it would have all the drivers you need with a checkbox next to it if it was requried and your machine was missing it. Also the service tag option Dell has helped locate exact drivers for your particular build on Dells site also. So yeah I just thought it was a bit more convient. HP's site defintiely needs some work since its not the most organized and user friendly.

Well anyways I have most of my review ready. I just need to take some pics to go along with it Stay tuned and good luck again.

 

I just put my review up. Enjoy!

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-...38-hp-elitebook-8560p-review.html#post7442118

 

Nice review. Thanks. I might reconsider buying 8460p :-D

 

The 8460p?? I didnt review that one I review the 8560p. Everything else is equal but the main reason I didnt get the 8460p was the crappy display. So unless that is addressed I wouldnt recommend the 8460.

Has anyone looked at this site? They sell a glossy screen for the 8460p and just about any hp laptop. I wonder if the quality is better

HP Elitebook LCD Screens

 

here is a professional review on the notebook
New Zealand PC World Magazine > Business laptops: HP EliteBook 8560p

review sucks and doesnt tell you anymore than the press release info. But they do give it 4.5 stars out of 5 .

 

Purchased a 8560p for someone in the office ... should arrive next week some time.

 

I was wondering the same thing myself. If I can just buy a different screen then I see no reason in having to get the larger 8560. Anyone have experience using a different monitor?

 

Can you check type of the SATA connections you have for main drive and option bay drive ? SATA 3 Gb or SATA 6 Gb ?

 

Ah ha ... mine just arrived a little while ago - am setting it up.

 

cool! let us know what you think!

 

Hmm ... ok - just my initial impressions here.

My overall positive impression is around the build and components and quality of the machine. It really is amazingly sturdy and well made! I like the resiliency of keyboard's keys, the trackpad and mouse buttons, the brightness of the screen, the good port selection, etc. All and all this is an excellent machine in term of build quality. Excellent heat control and the battery life is also quite good. Plenty of expansion options as well! (Although atm they are somewhat expensive, but that's no surprise.) It really is a strong, tough, durable beast that could make an ideal desktop replacement and even, should someone wish to tote around a heavy creature with added slice batteries) a viable long life machine away from a plug!

My overall negative impression has to do with the design style. It is quite inconvenient at times. I personally do not mind much, I can get used to it (this machine was purchased by the company for me, after all!), but I wonder how smart it is to design a machine in such an inconvenient way? The main aspect of inconvenience is in two areas. The first is the small distance between the actual keyboard and the full number pad. The number pad is not set apart enough imo (like, say on a 17" model business machine), so when typing it is possible for someone to accidentally hit the number pad instead of, say, the backspace or enter key. I have a feeling this one can be gotten to fairly quickly, though. The second design style failure (and the main one in my book) is places the optical drive and the sd card slot on the steeply sloping part of the bottom of the notebook. It is difficult to manually open the optical drive (and I have small hands with thin fingers!) or to place a card in and out of the slot. To me this is outright inconvenient and while I personally don't mind adjusting to it I wonder what HP was thinking in light of the business market? Most people want to spend their time producing without being interrupted by such inconveniences (either in the sense of the administration or the workers). It puzzles me.

All that being said, I am very happy with the machine. If HP had just not sloped down the bottom half of the machine and thus made the optical drive and sd card slot easier to access this would be an ideal machine for me. But I would admittedly be hesitant to recommend it to others....

 

haha the two negatives you point out I also stated in my review. Guess it wasnt just me after all And the keyboard you will get use to it. After two weeks of ue I'm good to go now.

 

*Goes back to re-read his review thread*

Why yes you did!

 

anyone know how to turn on the Function key so its always active. i dont need the F1 buttons and would rather have the brightness/volume controls always on

 

More pics of the screen. I think its on par with the MBP screen now with each having its own pros and cons. Take a look at the nice brightness/color/contrast and even the viewing angles are pretty good. Remember these pics were taken with a iphone. Looks better in person

 

WOW, that screen looks great.

 

Yeah, but he said it is only 80% of the 15" MBP anti-glare.

 

haha I need to edit my review. That was before tweaking the display. I would say the macbook is still slightly better in terms of contrast but this one has plusses over the MBP like the antiglare screen. THe more i use it the more i love this screen. I would say its closer to 90-95% of the MBP screen now

 

"The second design style failure (and the main one in my book) is places the optical drive and the sd card slot on the steeply sloping part of the bottom of the notebook. It is difficult to manually open the optical drive (and I have small hands with thin fingers!) or to place a card in and out of the slot. To me this is outright inconvenient and while I personally don't mind adjusting to it I wonder what HP was thinking in light of the business market? Most people want to spend their time producing without being interrupted by such inconveniences (either in the sense of the administration or the workers). It puzzles me."

I would say if they made you stand on your head to use the optical drive it would still be a minor issue. How often are they used now? It is certainly hard to escalate such a thing to a productivity issue.

 

Please let me know when you find out

 

I found a place on where you can do it on the older models thru BIOS settings. But the action key setting is not available in the BIOS version on my 8560p. There has to be a way since you can do it on the older and other HP notebooks

 

Pongo -- what'd you do to your screen ("tweaked") to make it so good? The angles & color look awesome. Way better than my 8460p.

 

First im not pongo. I did the review and did the screen shots.

what screen do you have on your 8460p? The 1366 x 768 or the 1600 x 900

That is the main reason why I got the 8560 over the 8460 is the screen quality. Don't want people to assume I did some magical thing with the screen. The screen on the 8560p was very very good to begin with. You cant make a inferior screen look amazing if its just inherently not a good screen. I just tweaked the color so its more accurate with the MBP. I just used ATi's controls and also windows color/monitor optimization.

Good luck. Curious to see which screen you have. lower res or higher res?

 

I mentioned this in my review also. Looks like there are a few of us that hate that design feature. Not a big deal for me since i rarely use the SD card/optical drive.. still a annoyance when I need to use it though

 

thanks for the advice! I modified my contrast using the windows color function, wow now the display looks even greater, comparing the previous and current settings its incredible.

 

So it's official! I'm an owner! I went ahead and did a CTO (it was actually much cheaper with my company discounts than a SmartBuy).

i7 2620m, 8gb RAM, 750gb HDD, Intel Centrino Ultimate 6300 Wifi Card are the highlights

It should be arriving on the 29th.

Yoshi, did you ever figure out the f keys?

Josh

 

I didnt.. its annoying. .I adjust the volume and brightness all the time.. checked everywhere . .cant find anything on it

 

I got my 8560p yesterday I have XU062UT but as I couldn't do CTO, I did it myself. the OCZ Vertex3 I had died in a few hours of being in the the laptop, I think there is some incompatability between OCZ and Dell/HP. The 2820QM is very quick I get 7.7 everything in WEI appart from GPU(5.3).

When I calibrated the screen at Gama 2.2, 6500K and brightness of 120nit. I got a deltaE of less than 2 so I'd say the pannel is pritty good, there is no obvious banding (unlike my 2540p)

I like the trackpad, I mught actually start using that over the nub, the night light seems very tight compaired to the ones on my other HP's hopefully it will free up over time. Theres no flex in the chassis, very macbook pro like.

 

Pannel is LG-Philips LP156WD1, 6bit, 250nit, 500:1

Here's calbrated results:

 

I've got a 8560p LQ589AW, with AMD graphics.

I would like to come back to the fan. My 8560p behaves like this:

On AC, with default BIOS the fan is always on. It is not loud, but it makes a kind of "houuuuuu" all the time, and I don't like this... And from time to time it really turns on seriously.

So I turned off the BIOS preference and deactivated the fan by default. On top of this, I worked on the Win7 energy settings, setting the cooling behaviour to passive and reducing the max CPU performance. This way, the fan is really silent. However, when working a little bit for a longer time, the machine obviously gets more and more warm, and the fan turns on from time to time and then is quite loud (at least to my ears).

I would like to know: Is this different with machines without AMD graphics? In a German forum a guy said he barely can hear his 8560p (without AMD). So maybe there is really a difference - who can tell?

Looking forward to comments on this.
Uli

PS: Otherwise I like this machine very much, very well built, very good performance.

 

Congrats to you both!

And congrats to the new machine to you as well.

Hmm ... for me the only time the fan has ever noticeably turned on (and even then it was not very loud) was when I was converting some video files from one format to another - which it did at amazing speeds, btw. I also have amd graphics, but have an i5 base cpu. Is you base cpu an i7? Who knows? Maybe that would make a difference?

 

That's really strange... I want this as well...

Mine is
- i5 2540m
- AMD graphics
- 1600x900
- 320 Hitachi HD (BTW this HD is quite loud, too...)

Which BIOS revision do you have? (When powering up press ESC, then F1).
Mine is 68SCF Ver. F.01, date 03/11/2011

However, at the moment there is no other BIOS version available on the HP site...

 

I have the i5 2410m cpu, AMD graphics, a 1366x768 screen, and a 500gb Western digital drive (don't ever recall hearing it spin up to be honest).

I also have the same BIOS version as you do.

So ... erm ... I don't know what to say....

 

Well, that's interesting: It's a smaller CPU, and the graphic card drives a smaller screen (pixel-wise). This may do a difference.

 

I got my F keys working, you have to install the Hotkey software on the driver page. I think that's the name, let me go find the name, but it adds some fancy graphics to your volumes and brightness etc. Works fine. I was pissy too about it and couldn't figure it out but thats it.

 

HP Hotkey Support. That's it.

 

No my function keys work what I want to do is not have to hit FN to use the hot keys but use the FN ket enable the f1 buttons if i needed. Old hps allow u to change the default in bios. This one i can't figure out how

 

I have the ATI gfx and with the 2820QM (45W), the fan kicks in a bit more than your probally seeing, I wouldn't say it was irritating though.

 

guys,

just found out, that my power adapter is making a some kind of strange whispering/buzzing noise when plugged in.

I have my laptop for 3 days now. Does anyone noticed that? Can you put your ear on your adapter , to check? It is interrupted buzzing noice, altough not loud enought to bother.

Thank you!

 

Mine seems fine, just a bit warm.

I got the extended battery for mine on the bottom, I have 135Whr of power, seems like it will last about 8hrs no probs, system seems to use about 14W not doing too much with wifi on, so maybe 10hrs.

I wish HP would be honest with there battery lifes, I can't see how you could ever get 16hrs?? as per specs

 

Hmm ... well, if you had the 100maH internal battery and the 100maH slice and went solely into word processing mode with all wireless off, the screen as dim as possible and cranked up the power saving features to their max you could prolly get sixteen hours total from the two batteries....

 

I plugged some speakers into the headphone socket, but they sounded really bad, anyone else tried this?

 

You have to deactivate all effects in the sound options. I had the same problem, playback via headphone was horrible until I found and switched off all these effects, which are unfortunately turned on by default.

 

Cheers, I went back to the default MS driver and it seems better, not as good as my desktop but close enough.

 

Does anybody know if the 6470m is worth the extra power consumption. I have to decide between a model with it or the HD3000, and i wonder how big the difference really is ?
I want to use the laptop for occasional CAD with CATIA, and a w-Model does not fit into my budget.

 

I returned my 8560p with AMD graphics and ordered one without, maybe I can tell somerhing about the difference in a few days or a week or so.

 

@Uli21: Why did you return your 8560b ? was it because of anything specific about the discrete graphics ?

 

I wasn't completely happy with the fan. Maybe only my personal problem... I hope the 8560p without AMD will produce less heat and less fan activity.

 

There is a site where you can order the Dreamcolor 2 display part. Given that the dv6t notebook is from the same company and the screen size is identical, would the socket fit? Tried customizing the Elitebook 8560w and turned out to be way too expensive!