*HP EliteBook 8740w Owners Lounge - PART 1*

Ah, not surprising. Well, waiting a bit will at least bring Fermi into the picture.

 

Yeah, and I don't know that it applies to higher-end systems. Prices will almost certainly not get worse, and new cards will probably push prices on older ones down. I'm betting that the right move both for price and for battery life will still be a Radeon offering; Fermi doesn't seem set to change the trend there.

Re: deceptive "sales"
I'm not sure whether to be more saddened when people are completely unsurprised at this all-too-common business practice, or when I mention it someone who is horribly shocked (and therefore probably a regular victim of same). *sigh*

 

Fermi desperately needs a die shrink to solve it's power consumption and heat woes. Until then, the best we can hope for is that lower tier variants make their way into business laptops to replace the aging CUDA-capable cards.

As for sales, I think a lot of people are oblivious, but those are the same people that would otherwise buy retail, so nothing lost, nothing gained. What did surprise me was that on Black Friday 09, of all places, Newegg was price gouging on some products...notably SSDs. I thought they were above that, but I guess the potential profits are too enticing. I ended up buying an SSD through Amazon instead...though, had to wait 10 days to get it. Typical. :\

Speaking of SSDs, it may be a bit dated (8/09), but this is a great in-depth article from Anandtech, The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD - AnandTech. Definitely a must read before buying one or ordering one with a new computer.

 

Response time has almost nothing to do with input lag.

 

Well, I guess I have to +1 that.
Same here, no crash but the fan pulsing at medium speed when coming out of sleep mode.

On another topic, I have to say I can't stand backlit keyboards. I don't look at my hands when I type, but a backlit keyboard just catches the eye (in every way). Really, for me, a backlit keyboard is just an annoyance.

 

BTW, is it possible to switch the backlit of the keyboard off?

 

Great resource. It even mentions BOE-Hydis which made an improved S-IPS panel with Advanced Frag Field Shielding (AFFS) for about a couple of hundred ThinkPads in 2006. I was lucky enough to draw one of those in my T60p.

At any rate, it's June 15th. Where are the supposed DC2 IPS panels? Do we have any updates? Last time I called in, I was told by someone who seemed quite knowledgeable and who didn't need to think about his answer very long at all. He said QA issues pushed the May release date to mid-June. Well...?

On a different note, but still within the "IPS high-end display realm", today's also the first day that we can pre-order a device that has a 326ppi screen at 3.5" and also features an LED-backlit IPS screen with a resolution of 960x640. The iPhone 4. Since the fall of 2009, Apple has IPS technology for almost every product of its product lines that has a screen on it: iMac 21.5"/27". CineDisplay 24"/30". iPad 9.7". iPhone 3.5". Everything except the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air series', which are the only ones left to get IPS. And they're next!

So how about it, HP...I really like Windows 7, and the 8740w looks red-hot, so if we can only remedy that one little spec. lol...

 

Yeah man, I had the Envy 15 a couple of months ago and ended up returning it. The rubber pads meant to separate the screen from the keyboard were not glued on properly and the glossy bezel was very cheap looking (not an issue with your laptop since it is e2e glass).

Plus I hear nothing but bad things about HP home's warranty service. People are getting back damaged laptops.

I made a spreadsheet comparing the features of the Elitebook 8740w vs. the Envy 17 and once you normalize the options (3 year warranty, etc.), the price difference isn't as big as you would think, even with HP Home's coupons.

 

Yes, fn+spacebar will toggle it on/off.

 

HP might be replacing my computer with an upgraded system to capture my computer for evaluation. I need some quick advice. I could get Quaddro FX 3800M instead of my ATI GPU for free on top of a bunch other upgrades. But I'm not sure if I stick with ATI or switch to the more expensive Nvidia. While I do use AutoCAD, I got a powerful GPU for gaming, so the Nvidia seems like a waste of battery and heat....but it's hard to pass up something so expensive for free. Help me ASAP. They will be calling back very soon.

 

I'd go for ATI hands down, but that's too personal an opinion.


EDIT: you can go for 3800M and then sell it and buy the FirePro back + an SSD or two

 

Review of the Geforce 480M is up!

 

And here is another review of someone who tested the same system with a 5870 GPU. And it proves that there's 0 advantage, other than in heavy tessellation.

 

I thought about re-sale value, but I'm just not interested in making this any more complicated.

I decided to stick with the ATI. Here is what I'm getting.

i7-820QM (upgrade)
ATI M7820
320 GB HDD (upgrade)
WUXGA+
8 GB RAM (2D) (upgrade)
I get to keep my power adapter so now I'll have 2.
I also get to keep my backlit keyboard, I just have to swap them around.

The new system should be here tomorrow morning. That totally makes these problems worthwhile for me. If I had spec'd my original machine this way, it would have cost me $500 more (after my rep discount is applied to the upgrades). I guess if I billed them my hourly rate of my time spent messing with this system, I'm far short, but that's a ridiculous expectation. Right now I am a very satisfied HP customer!

 

:cry: WAAAAH! I just got an email citing "material shortage" and giving an indfinite delay warning (and the order page's expected ship date has moved back A MONTH.

I'm afraid to reply to that email for fear of accidentally causing a cancellation or otherwise screwing up my order, but I don't think the sales rep can do anything either . . . advice on what I should do about this?

 

Thanks. That user review is more useful. That notebookcheck.net review didn't use the same machine for the benchmarks.

I came to a similar conclusion earlier in this thread by comparing the desktop version of the Radeon 5770 (equivalent to Mobility 5870)to the desktop version of the Geforce GTX 465 (equivalent to 480M).

 

Have you tried looking at the "tracking information" directly from the order status page? I got the same email, but it turns out my machine had already shipped. However HP did send me a shipping notification before the delay email.

 

I just got my 8740w yesterday (i7-820QM, 16GB RAM, nVIDIA 2800M WUXGA+webcam, 500GB disk), and am running into the exact same problems that knight427 describes

1) Random hard crashes that instantly power off the computer -- as if you suddenly yanked the power cable on a batteryless system

2) Medium fan noise when resuming from sleep mode

I can't correlate (1) very well with any specific activity -- apart from the observation that when it recurs in a short period of time, temperature may be a possible culprit. The first or second time it happened, I was watching a video with VLC player, and had paused the video for a few minutes. It suddenly crashed/powered off.

With (2), I can get the system to fail fairly consistently: sleep+resume, and then sleep+resume again within a short period of time. When it resumes the second time, the fan will get very noisy and it will typically crash/poweroff within a minute.

I'm still debating whether or not I should just return it at this point, instead of plunging into a possibly frustrating customer support experience.

knight427 -- I'm really impressed with your patience in jumping through all of the hoops, and I thank you for posting your experiences. Do you know if I could request to speak with the same support person who is handling your case? That way at least I'd be dealing with someone who has some background about these issues.

 

Sorry I should be more specific.

Response time is how long it takes a pixel to turn colors. I do not care so much about response time, because every monitor, as you correctly state, has pretty good response times of less than a frame (16ms).

Input lag is how long it takes from a signal to the monitor to the monitor changing all the pixels to that new image. Even many TN panels with 2ms response time have input lag > 1 frame (16ms). If the DC2 IPS panel only has 16ms of input lag, I wouldn't mind, as I'm not THAT good at street fighter 4 yet. But more than 3 frames (50ms) is noticeable, and the best IPS monitors out there have at least 33ms of lag.

 

A test for all those having the crashes:

Could you disable the sleep/hibernate mode entirely and see if the crashes disappear?


@ Koshinn,
If the lag is too obvious and noticeable then I'm back to AW and will just remodd the E2E lid assembly, cut the plastic frame out, insert a proper matte RGB LED and enjoy

 

kartik, I'm sorry to hear you have the same problems. I dealt primarily with people over chat in India. I didn't have one person, but I started to recognize the same 5-6 names each time I logged in, so I'm not sure if they had a small team for 8740w or if they mark your IP address or something and put into a smaller group. But in any case, they are simply there to screen out the obvious problems by making you update all drivers, and then make you reload your OS. After that, they will send out an on-site tech (mine was scheduled for today to change the video card, then I got the call from someone else at HP that wanted to get a hold of my laptop to investigate...so service was canceled).

I can give you the name and number of the guy who set me up with this great upgrade deal. however, I can't promise you anything and your system has little room for upgrading. Based on what they had on-hand, you could maybe get FX 3800M and get them to send more RAM and upgraded HDD (theirs were all 8GB RAM and 320GB HDD). But I'd be surprised if they would do a swap before you jumped through some hoops.

Also, my Sleep/Fan issue is 100% repeatable, no need to double Sleep. My crashes have been better since reinstalling the OS, but not gone. They also seem correlated to different uses now. Originally they were strongly correlated to full-screen gaming (but not windowed gaming) or something from a website (usually some Flash animation or something). Now they are more correlated with a failed startup/wakeup or doing something on Facebook. But the sample size is somewhat low, so it's hard to be certain.

 

Well to be honest, even at 3 frames of lag, it's only 1/20th of a second lag. The only three things I can think of that you'd notice the lag are high level FPS, music, and fighting games. Streetfighter 4 has combos (called links) that require an input within a 1-3 frame window depending on the combo. If you have to complete the input before the actual window, your timing will be off between playing on your IPS panel and a non-lagging TN panel in a tournament. In fast, high difficulty songs in games like DDR or Guitar Hero, timing becomes much more strict and frame lag can lead to failures. And of course in FPS games, the pace of gameplay is so fast that 3 frames of lag + inherently internet latency means that your opponent could see you before you see him and therefore kill you for "free" if they have good enough reflexes.

 

Now I see, thanks for the explanation, Koshinn.

 

I did, and originally thought all was well, but then I noticed the subtle change from 15-Jun-2010 to 16- Jul-2010, and nearly :cry: like a little girl.

I'm hoping that's just S.O.P. when they're not sure and that it goes through, but the status is 'Admin/Processing" and there's nothing in any of the progress rows on Product Status, so I'm worried.

. . . do people think I should bug my sales rep again? Or call the number from the delay notice email?

This is doubly frustrating with people here getting them now, and the one day replacement thing . . . [I realize you've jumped through more hoops, not mad at you, I just can't understand this material shortage when they're evidently still making them for some people . . .]

 

Well, the replacement unit was not CTO, at least not to my specs. He had 3 systems on hand for me to chose from (or 3 builds to chose from, not sure exactly). Basically I could chose which GPU I wanted, everything else between the 3 was the same. These units were appropriated to him to trade with people like me, who knows how long ago they were actually put together.

I'd start with the number from the email. No one here knows what is happening to HP's supply chain and how that will effect your specific unit. You'll be lucky to find someone inside HP who can answer that. I can guratee that your rep won't know w/o asking someone else. So start with the email phone number, if they are unhelpful, go through your rep. I found both my reps followed through on promises to investigate questions they could not immediately answer.

Sorry about your delay, I'd be very frustrated too.

 

a) Oh, I see, that is significantly less rage-making.

b) Thanks for advice, am commencing phonetastic funtimes! :confused2:

 

Ah -- I purchased next business day onsite service, so maybe I can bypass the first stage.

Sure, that'd be great -- my email address is [email protected]. I'm not so much looking for an upgrade, just someone who can cut through red tape and escalate this issue. Since at least 4-5 people seem to have this same problem with systems right out of the box, I seriously doubt it's caused by any actions that we all independently took. Hopefully HP will identify this as a priority issue to address.

I was unclear in my writing. In my case the sleep/fan issue is 100% repeatable too. But in addition to that, I can also trigger the hard crash/poweroff issue fairly consistently with multiple sleep+resume cycles. I'll have HWinfo32 and the Windows resource monitor running in the background, and then just keep sleep/resuming till the fan resumes at a louder level, and then it'll crash/poweroff within 15-30 seconds.

 

My warranty is 3/3/3 8740w US Vendor Number VM914AV#ABA...is that different than yours? Just curious. I'm not sure if I had the option to get someone on-site w/o going through chat. I went on-line first b/c that seemed fastest, though they actually hadn't set up their chat support for 8740w (or something like that) so I called first, and then switched to chat once they opened it up since I liked that better than phone support. Maybe I started in the wrong place.

I'll send it off right after this.

I tried cycling 5 times, then opened Cupid HWmonitor and Resource Manager, tried another 5 cycles...no hard crashes. Too bad, I'd like to give the HP techs a head start on tracking down the problem.

 

:laugh: yeah the w500 is the way to go i guess...but listen..XD i saw the X201..thats a little devil...my dad won't buy another desktop...i had a talk with him he won't....................

Also which build should i go for with the w500?

look above and i'll wait for back to school i guess

^huh :confused2: :laugh:

 

I think that's just the standard warranty. I have that line-item, but in addition to that I also have this item:

UG843E
HP 5y Nbd Onsite/ADP Notebook Only SVC

Bummer. Was hoping you might be able to get the same result. I also downloaded CPUID HWmonitor and was able to reproduce the problem (I don't think the temperature monitor is necessarily a facilitator, but I have seen the problem happen more readily when I have some things like this running while I do the sleep+resume cycles).

 

@ Kartik and Knight,
Asking again,
Have you tried disabling all the sleep/hibernate/etc power saving modes? Do the crashes still happen in that case?

 

are the crashes only happening on i7 models?

 

I haven't tried that. Occasionally, I have seen the failure occur right from a cold boot. This would lead me to believe that the problem can happen independent of sleep/hibernate/etc modes.

Apart from the multiple sleep/resume process, I haven't found a way to consistently reproduce the problem. If I can find another way to reproduce the problem on-demand, then I could disable sleep/hibernate/etc and conclusively determine whether or not that's a factor.

 

I only have the laptop for tonight, my new one is supposedly going to be here in the morning (no shipping confirmation though). So even if I figured out how to disable sleep/hibernate, it would be far from conclusive since I've gone more than 24hrs w/o a crash before. I'm currently more interested in documenting another crash for HP if possible.

 

So i posted a thread on Desktop review to see if my current desktop can be upgraded for power I'm going to persuade my mom...she can change everything, and for the netbook well X201 seems fine..or i can get a HP netbook or something...so hold on the thought..if all else fails...then W510 here I come :laugh:

 

guys no one goes on that forum so i'll quote my post :laugh:

 

I've been looking @ my order off & on that last few weeks. I don't when it happened exactly, but in the last few days my item 1232570, VG322AV, LCD 17.0 WUXGA+WVA DC2 f/CAM 8740w just went from Stock Code X to H !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It might really be happening!

edit: YES, and the "more info" link states:

Part # Ship Date Est. Delivery Date Ship Qty Vendor Status
1232570 06/30/2010 1 HP USA-PORTABLES DROP SHIP (D7) INTERCO Scheduled/SCHD

 

Good news everyone!

Will call them tomorrow to see what's up.
I was about to cancel the order, lol

 

I was testing the Sleep/Wake thing again trying to induce a crash. I didn't crash, but I did discover that a low battery will throttle fan down (but plugging it back in ramps it right back up). Not sure if this is useful.

 

Cool, but if it goes out of stock again, I'm writing this thing off as vaporware and going elsewhere.

True Sultan, I think we've thoroughly answered your original question. If you need more help, you should use the other specific sub-forums on NotebookReview.com as to not clutter up this thread with non-8740w related posts.

I think the " What Notebook Should I Buy?" section is a good place to start.

*edit* I don't mean to be the guy with only 15 posts telling it like it is, but it's probably not fair to the people that are posting here to diagnose 8740w crashing issues and have to sift through non-related posts.

 

Hrm, keptin has a point (says the other guy with virtually no posts).

Also, update on the mysterious delay: still mysterious.

I talked to HP folk and spent a good while holding only to have them come back with no information on what the delay is or when it might be fixed. Oh, and a new order number. There are now at least two for this active order, more if you count the original, canceled one. And three pending charges on my credit card. Unless this new new number spawned a fourth.

. . . got my spare power brick and battery today though! And my RAM and SSD!

*headdesk*

 

Our sample size is pretty small to definitively say, but so far the only reports I've seen are on i7 models. Here's another new report on the HP Support Forum for an i7-720:

Re: 8740w shuts off with four memory chips - Page 3 - HP Support Forum

 

Been a while since I posted here, (thanks to crunch time at work...) but like most of you, I still don't have my 8740w I even tried to order a second one w/o DC2... (and it was delayed too...)

The status of the DC2 panel on my order changed also. So hopefully something is happening... I actually wanted to laptop for a project at work... So much for that...

On another note, @ sleep/hibernate crash/fan issues. Have you guys tried to disable or at least adjust the CPU's turbo mode and "power settings?"

While those features are nice, I have seen issues with using them for both desktop and laptop systems.

If you guys have Everest, have it running in the background while logging your CPU clk and fan speed. I have a feeling that there may be a slight de-sync of the clk speed adjustments and fan speeds. Which led to overheated, albeit very briefly, CPUs that led to a crash.

Which really begs the question, how finely tuned are the fans on the 8740w? I hope we can custom make the temperature steps for fan speed adjustments.

 

The last one is usually addressed by a BIOS fix. It's not something that can be easily tweaked by the user.

 

Unless a CPU can jump from 50 degrees to "overheated" without being reported in Cupid HWmonitor, this is not what is happening. I always have 30 seconds of warning before a crash, I've often had both MWmonitor and GPU-Z open to observe that temps were normal.

 

I tried looking in the BIOS for a way to disable Turbo Mode, but couldn't find anything. I found a tool called i7 Turbo which has a checkbox to disable turbo mode:

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/3/3/1794507/Turbo.zip

I tried checking this box, but when I sleep+resume, the box is unchecked again. So I'm not sure if I can properly disable Turbo Mode to test.

I ran "Everest Ultimate", but it doesn't show any fan sensors. The tools that I have which show temperatures usually show them in 50s (i.e. not overheated) when the problem happens. My best guess is that when the system resumes from sleep, some variable that caches the temperature gets corrupted somehow. In response, the system turns on the fan up to mid-level even though the temperature is actually not that hot. And in some cases, the system is confused into turning on the fan even higher. For whatever reason, that temperature variable gets stuck and the system still thinks it's very hot. So after 30 seconds it shuts down all power as a failsafe.

Again -- that's just a guess at this point.

 

My new laptop is here...be back later with some pics.

EDIT: Off to a bad start. The new laptop crashed 3 times trying to do initial setup (OS setup went fine, problems happens once I got into Windows and HP setup started). Once set up, it was more stable, but I was still getting crashes at a much higher rate than my current machine. I popped pff the lower RAM cover to see the sytem has 4x2GB RAM, so all DIMMS are full (presumably, still working on getting the keyboard off).

I put it sleep twice, and it did not have the fan problem.

Well, I need to go find a maintenance manual so I don't accidentally damage the keyboard while removing it.

 

The "burning" question -- does it resume from sleep mode without the fan turning on? If so, what BIOS version does it have?

 

I edited my last post...no sleep problem. How do I check BIOS version? I'm in the middle of switching keyboards. Logging off old computer now.

EDIT: just remembered client needed something by end of day at it's getting late, gotta abort the keyboard swap and do some work, then family time until 8...be back later tonight with more updates

 

Run msinfo32.exe, look for "BIOS Version/Date" on the main page.

Interesting that you are still getting crashes but the sleep problem is gone. Do you still get the 30-second high-fan warning before each crash?