*HP EliteBook 8740w Owners Lounge - PART 1*

Yeah, I'd really like to know what's going on with your order, m8? Any good news?
My EDD moved to the 30th, hopefully this month, heh.....

 

Nah, going backwards. Order was updated on the 5th [today] to set the planned delivery date to it original, of "date will follow". After a half dozen updates to that date, they've just thrown their hands up in defeat...

 

Yeah, I'll try tomorrow.

 

Just curious, has anyone had issues with the latch mechanism?

When I was doing evals before the 8710 never had an issue but both the 8730w and the 6930p would have an issue where the latch would get progressively harder to close and eventually would get to the point where it would no longer be able to latch fully.

 

Man...so not a single laptop with one of the DC2 panels has shipped, has it? Having been loyal to the ThinkPad brand for over 11 years, I was ready to buy the W701, but right around that time, HP announced the 8740w. I guess I'm starting to find out as to why I never left IBM/Lenovo. I'm only here waiting because of the DreamColor 2 display. Why did they claim to be able to ship on 6/21 when in reality, they apparently knew that they couldn't....?

This is not the first time that HP has announced a product, only to drop it 6 months later with no real explanation. Almost immediately after Apple announced its iPad, HP claimed that they had a prototype tablet which was going to be a serious contender in the tablet PC market. They bragged about how it was so much better than the iPad, that it would include Flash and better connectivity and compatibility, etc. Several months later, HP simply announced that the product "would not make it to store shelves". lol...How lame. Microsoft did the very same thing with its Courier tablet, which was also dropped recently, and also without any plausible explanation.

Apple is having a tough time with shipping its products, too. But that's because the demand of its blockbuster hit IPS LED-backlit iPad is unrelenting, so you can only ever get it by making a reservation well in advance. Now that's a good problem to have. Even "worse" is the new iPhone 4, the first ever smartphone with an LED-backlit IPS screen. At least Apple announces its products for a specific date and delivers (literally and figuratively) every time. At the present time, the MacBook's are the only product line that does not feature a premium IPS display. Hopefully, that'll happen next time the MBP's refresh, so we don't have to deal with this kind of non-sense anymore.

 

Only one correction to this intro of your insightful post... HP 'claimed' it could deliver the 1st time, on April 28th to me at least. I imagine on or about that date to others who ordered IPS screens; wasn't one of our contributor's in this thread originally April 15?

Perhaps there were a few people in the operations/delivery chain that were shaking their heads, perhaps pounding the table, and wondering what the heck was going on taking the orders and letting the delivery time calculate to the the standard ship date with no word given to we consumers, but that certainly didn't make it to our liaisons, that being anyone we could ever reach on the phone.

Thanx for the edjamacation regarding HP's recent antics. If Dell or Lenovo announce an IPS 10-bit displays before the end of the month, I very well may jump-ship too. I seriously doubt they can/will -- I don't believe any of them, or AUO, is in a position to deliver -- but just putting it out there.

 

They let you play with their toys on a personal machine??

(Or just fooling around . . . ?)

(& many others)
Yeah, I'm here for the 16:10 and the M7820. I'm edging closer to going with the Dell Precision 6500 every day despite the weaker card. I used to love thinkpads, and almost went with one before seeing the HP's ATI card. Kinda wish I hadn't now . . .

Is it generally possible to mess with gcards across manufacturers? eg, get a "replacement part" M7820 and throw it into the Dell (Or the lenovo I suppose)?

 

Nearly impossible.

You need a BIOS support for the "alien" card for it to even get recognized by the system, a modified heatsink
and welcome to beta testing

 

Yeah, that's what I suspected, but I figured I'd check just in case. *sigh*

A pox upon HP and their pretty pretty shinies! DANGIT, why do you tempt me so successfully?!

 

I know, and it looks like a great opportunity for Lenovo and Dell to steal the customers. I'm especially interested in Lenovo's success as they are among the very best in reliability and have lowest prices among all other business notebooks vendors.
All they need to do is to start offering M7820 and Quadro based on 480M, and even without the IPS screen it should be enough to sway many potential customers.
I almost pulled the trigger a few weeks ago when they had a 30% off on W701 ~2k $

 

First, with quadro as well as FireGL, you are allowed to have one single 10bit color on the compatible screen.( as opposed to three 10bit of Matrox Xenia solution.)

Second, native 10bit panel is much better than vibrant 10 bit panel( from 8 bit to 10 bit) in terms of details reproduction.

 

Could you please provide some links showing comparisons and supporting information?

 

Just got my docking station last Friday. I scored a sweet deal on an open box 120w advanced docking station.

 

but what do you want with the 120w docking station?

I think you need the 230w NZ223AA for the 8740w ?

 

@Aikimox, in regards to:

Ooop, strike that; I stand corrected. I hadn't realized until the last few days that this has been happening every night for weeks; it reads that every night then expected delivery date becomes the current date. I hadn't been checking nights so hadn't seen this happening before.

On a plus note, the compounding discounts has added up to 32.5% for me. Perhaps I'll even be able to add a "so far" to that if they screw me/us again.

edit: this just in today. Was just told the estimated ship date is now the 10th for me. Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice...or is it thrice now?...you know the rest. [rolls eyes ]

 

... post removed due to duplicate of info posted before ... (there's no deleting of posts on this board I guess)

 

Not sure if this has been mentioned in this thread already, but we recently took delivery of a few of these 8740w EliteBooks, and found that we were getting inconsistent memory size reporting. First of all, BIOS was saying we had 200+ GB RAM installed. At the same time, Windows 7 (64 bit) was reporting that we had 30 GB installed, but out of that, only 4GB was "usable".

Was going through the throes of providing HP with photos/screenshots when I read in the manual about the "Primary Memory" slots, and "Expansion Memory" slots. All of our EliteBooks were shipped with 2 x 4GB DIMMs, and we soon realised it was WHERE the DIMMs where installed that was the problem. Both DIMMs were installed (by HP) in the Expansion Memory area, which, according to the printing on the PCB, contained slots 2 & 3. Slots 1 & 4 were underneath the keyboard.

We put one DIMM in Slot 1 (under the keyboard) and the other DIMM in Slot 2 (in the Expansion bay on the backside), and voila. 8GB correctly reporting in BIOS and WIndows 7.

Hope this saves someone some mucking around when they get their EliteBook

Cheers,
Brett

 

Yah, the need to install a pair of DIMMs in the correct memory slots (somewhat oddly paired with one under the keyboard and one in the expansion bay) has been mentioned before in connection with problems people have had with crashes when all four memory slots are full --- but it's interesting that HP themselves didn't know how to do it properly (!)

 

Ugh mine has been delayed until at least the 21st. I needed this laptop. And they said the delay is due to chassis parts being out of stock, but the DC2 panel.

 

FYI: absolutely nothing new to report on the "fix", if you are waiting for the crash bug to get fixed you should probably either contact HP to let them know more people have this problem, or just move on if you are in the first 30 days...they seem to be in no hurry to fix this

 

the BIOS Update F.04 should be available from tomorrow, but maybe it changes nothing

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c02202898&prodTypeId=321957&prodSeriesId=4138087

 

At best, it will fix the sleep/fan issue.

 

Baby steps.

 

I was planning on buying a raid setup for my upcoming confused: ) 8740W. Then came across this post ( link) where he says the e-sata port on the 8740W doesn't support external raid 0. Has anyone tried.? I saw a few posts back where Rampage did setup raid 0 - was it internal or external raid 0?
I want to avoid buying a expansion base to do the external raid 0.

 

external raid 0 is a scary concept.

 

I shipped my laptop back to HP support earlier this week, so that they could install the F.04 BIOS. I just received it back today and have been doing some testing.

So far, so good -- I put the system into multiple sleep/resume cycles and the fan does not turn on unnecessarily. I'm also running some burnin tests and will try to continue to exercise the system. My 30-day return window closes early next week, so I'll need to make a decision pretty soon. If the system exhibits a good deal of stability in the meantime, I'll be inclined to keep it, but if it continues to crash, I'll probably return it.

Here's hoping that F.04 fixes the problems (even though they're not mentioned in the release notes!)

 

CRASH. Just got a crash after I ran a 15-minute burnin test and did a sleep/resume.

Not looking good.

 

Thanks for the update.
So, the F.04 version did fix the sleep/resume - that's a good start.
Too bad the crashes are still there though. But I'm gonna take my chances and won't cancel the order. There's no way for me to return the system after receiving it, but I'm sure we'll isolate the culprit and find a workaround or fix it eventually.

 

I thought F.04 was supposed to be out today. They still have F.03 up on their website.

 

Just experienced another crash after an extended time of just sitting idle.

I have initiated the return process. It's unfortunate that this one
didn't work out, I had been eagerly anticipating the 8740w.

If this issue can be solidly resolved in the near-term, and if I resist the temptation to go get something like a ThinkPad W701 or some other high-end WUXGA laptop, there's still a chance that I may reconsider this product. But I just couldn't justify keeping it around with this catastrophic failure unresolved.

Thanks again to everyone for all of your help in troubleshooting this problem. Best of luck to you and to HP to get these things fixed!

 

I'm totally excited about getting a 8740w to be my main mobile buddy, eventually. Just not willing to be a guinea pig, I don't have time or energy for it.

What other notebook would be good as a temporary-ultra-portable? I had my eye on the 5310m, but I'd like my min memory to be 6 gigs and that notebook only has one slot and maxes out at 4 gigs.

 

I'm willing to be a guinea pig for this system!
Keep an eye on this thread guys

 

Thank you for keeping us in touch. Sorry to hear that story though...

If the new F.04 BIOS didn't do anything to fix this serious problem with sudden crashes - I'm afraid that it is a design problem. That means that it will require a new motherboard to be redesigned, tested, and produced to replace the old one. And that takes a time... a lot. It's a bad news for everyone - for those who already own 8740w, and those who is waiting for it

 

for which system? don't you already have a HP 8750?

 

???? 8750 doesn't exist yet.

 

i mean 8740w

 

In order to discard the crash issue is a *hardware problem*, some 8740w owner should test the 4 RAM slots filled with another operating system instead of Windows 7. I suggest Windows Vista, XP or even a Linux distribution. If crashes are gone, then you can make sure it's a software problem, and then, it will have an easy fix (it may be a driver update). This could help HP to find out the root cause.

 

1...2...3...not it

 

This is ridiculous. I haven't even ordered the damn thing yet, and we're already talking about turning it in for repair or returning it altogether??? What's going on with HP? I am a ThinkPad guy, and I'm not used to anything like this. Looks like I've been spoiled by IBM and Lenovo for 11 years.

It goes beyond hardware issues, too, with HP sending out products that are incorrectly configured, i.e. RAM chips are installed to where they have to be removed and installed in a totally illogical way?

I really have to get a laptop this month. This month. This waiting around is going on half a year now. I'm usually always the first to say something like "Anticipation is half the fun", but I can't do it for much longer. Why are any of us putting up with this, by the way? Some ThinkPad users consider HP to be beneath them. Is this what they are referring to? Has this ever happened before with the release of this company's flagship EliteBook?

Besides the W701 and the M6500, have any of you considered another brand? Do any of you have any experience with the 17" WUXGA MacBook Pro?

/end rant

 

AFAIK, ThinkPAd W510 has a similar crashing problem when the ram slot n.3 is populated. I don't think it's a 100% HP's fault.
@ Knight,
What Linux distro (if any) have you tried?

 

@knight427: Why not?

 

wait...are you guys telling me that the ram is causing crashes on both W510 and 8740w? Why? Is it a bios problem? or a circuit problem?

 

I'd need a very detailed guide on how to make a new partition, install Linux (or whatever is free) and how to dual boot. This also can in no way risk crashing my hard drive, I'm not going through another Win7 setup anytime soon.

 

Bro you heard of wubi install? You can install Ubuntu through windows 7. You can partition everything out. You have an SSD? Use the SSD to install Linux. Plus you can configure GRUB to boot win 7.

here is a documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot

how to configure grub: GRUB bootloader - Full tutorial

Also there are more google search. One thing though, if you did have an SSD, you wouldn't need to configure grub as during install, set grub to install on the SSD so it won't overwrite your MBR. The when u want to boot to linux, boot up the SSD. If not then windows will boot normally.

 

Best way is to run a linux live cd, ubuntu allows this. Iirc, ubuntu is always a live cd first off, but allows you to install it to your HDD later if you like it.

A live cd (dvd) means there are no changes made to your system. After you pull out the dvd and restart your computer, nothing has changed.

 

pretty much..but i think he would want to install it, the live cd kinda limits stuff to. Also since u own a 8740w...does yours crash to? Any problems?

 

As True_Sultan pointed out, the best way (especially to run a while for testing) is now Wubi. It gives you a full, installed Ubuntu system, dual-booting, BUT you don't have to partition anything and you can uninstall it like any other Windows program. (Basically it hooks into the Windows bootloader and makes a virtual partition as a single file within Windows. You sacrifice a bit of disk performance, but not much, and configuration changes stick from boot to boot since it's a "real" install.)

Installation is simple: download the installer, run it, tell it the size you want. Bam, done, dual-boot, no changes to your disk structure or to Windows system stuff.

 

This sounds simple enough. Any seconds or objections?

 

yup yup guys.....

lost buyer i still don't know which lappy to get...idk when fermi will come out...I WANT FERMI

 

Oh, and if you're not familiar with Linux, installing stuff is a bit different - you use the Ubuntu Software Center (or other programs, but it's the prettiest and I think easiest for new users), which is kinda like the iPhone/Android app store - you search for an app you want, click download, and it installs everything it needs. You uninstall in the same place, and everything is automatically kept up-to-date and compatibility-checked.

A guided Tour in ubuntu software center

You can still look for programs online like you would with Windows, but to install, just copy the name into the Software Center search, rather than downloading an installer. Or you can just search the Software Center for terms related to what you want and browse the apps that pop up.


I suggest trying Nexuiz with the pretty turned up as a fun stress test.