*HP EliteBook 8740w Owners Lounge - PART 1*

Glad to see that they finally came out with the DC2 models. I'm pretty damned envious.


But, I guess I can console myself with the fact that by going with the G73JH instead, I was able to have that much more money to put towards the new car I bought on Saturday. (at least, that's what I'll keep telling myself while I stare at a glossy 1080P TN LCD. At least it's a good one)

 

It is included within the normal driver package

NVIDIA DRIVERS 258.96 WHQL

read: Upgrades PhysX System Software to version 9.10.0224

or I don't understand for what the extra PhysX Software is needed

 

for me any price for the quadro is good I work with 3dsmax; Maya; Zbrush etc etc + AE all the time.

 

just because is not included in the HP fx3800 drivers.... or if you accidently removed PhysX with the old display driver... than you cant update because is nothing to update. Simple test is just to check it with the GPU-Z PhysX

 

For those of you who have this new notebook and have prior experience with RGBLED screens, I am curious: does the DC2/IPS panel have a superior picture to an RGB?

IIRC, I've read in some of the prior posts here how Windows 7 wont show colors properly in 10 bit mode on the DC2 but it will in 8 bit. That makes me wonder when this notebook can properly display colors in 10 bit mode in windows 7 or XP. That is to say, will it ever be capable of natively displaying 10 bit color in windows?

Ever since I heard of the DC2 coming out with an IPS display, I've been delaying a purchase waiting for it, but if its true potential can only be used in specialized applications, I'm not sure its worth it. Unless I've missed something (and it wouldn't be the first time) the Dell M6500 8 bit native disaplay on its RGBLED does not seem to be a problem, and it has a second drive bay w/o losing the optical drive. I've also read of intermittent display issues with the DC2 panel. I know new technology in any computer often has some hardware/software bugs in its early stages, but it does make me wonder if all the trouble is worth it, since I'd be getting the DC2 for its vibrancy/richness of colors and wide angle of viewing, not for photo/image applications...

Can a DC2 owner help fill me in on this?

 

You would think so...
But for some reason, when I install either HP drivers or the normal drivers, PhysX does not install automatically in my laptop.
Yet for some reason, in the nvidia control panel it was marked as "enabled". Even though it didn't show up in gpu-z or in the "uninstall or change program" section.

After I used the link xsrx provided, it now shows up as active on gpu-z and it shows up as a separate driver in the "uninstall or change program" section.

 

Yes DC2 has superior color to a extent. I do have a RGBLED screen in my office and i can say i like the DC2 much better. The real benefit comes in terms of viewing angle and true to color reproduction.

Its not like windows wont show color in 10-bit, it's just when the notebook is started/re-started it goes to the end of world screen during the login prompt, but a immediate restart solves it. And it happens only few times. It doesn't happen in the middle of computer usage. Honesty you wouldn't notice a difference between 10-bit and 8-bit on a regular usage, unless you pixel peep pictures/videos/as the need may be.
Windows native 10-bit is a debatable and has mixed responses. So can't say for sure. also note that currently Aero theme is disabled when in 10-bit mode.

Even i was looking at M6500 and Lenovo W701 before looking at 8740W, but i can tell now that it was worth the wait. Apart from all the benefits stated above, i feel the 8740W feel and weight is better than the other 2.

If you are not going to use it for Photo/Video editing/CAD applications, then a DC2 is not much of a benefit(with regard to its advertised usage need) apart from viewing angles and color vibrancy.

I would let other chime in with their thoughts as well.

 

Raelin, I'll add to what NotebookGrail said.

I'd personally say "using Windows" in 10-bit mode is more of a hindrance than benefit if you are one who makes use of and enjoys the features of Aero. That being due to the sometimes start-up problem, lose of the WinKey+Tab 3D behavior, or seeing a live preview of the actively running app when mousing over the app on the Start Bar, funky icons, funky Webpages, and other things I'm sure. It really can only be taken advantage up in true "color managed" applications. As far as I know not even Lightroom takes advantage of it, that that's my main tool on my 8740w.

Now with that said, keep this in mind. The bit-mode will not affect the range of colors [Gamut] the screen can produce, just the number of colors produced within the gamut. (I think I might put this in my sig) So what this is to say is don't confuse color gamut with the number of distinct steps of color, which is now over 1 billion with 3 channels at 10-bit. So you can still operate windows in Full/Native Gamut, AdobeRGB Gamut, or sRGB Gamut, all with 16.7 million distinct colors (8-bit), or the same gamuts with over a billion distinct colors (10-bit). In either instances (10 or 8 bit) the 'deepness?' of the color that can be shown will not change.

Have you seen my post showing the off-angle performance of the screen? (many pages back at this time) Post #2237: http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-...book-8740w-owners-lounge-224.html#post6470413 When you consider that on any 17" in your lap or within reach of your arms and eyes you're looking at the corners at perhaps a 20 degree angle, the fact that this DC2 display has the viewing angle that it has makes the whole image on the screen more uniform and brilliant.

 

Hmm. I wonder whats the minimum 'bitness' of the display required to show the different colour spaces. Or whats the number of colors present in each color space?

 

There is an update on the HP forum about the memory crashing issue:

8740w shuts off with four memory chips - Page 6 - HP Support Forum

with a software fix for non-vPro enabled systems. Apparently vPro systems will require a hardware fix (which I guess must've been made already to the recently shipped systems since mine is vPro-enabled and it doesn't crash).

Not sure what conflict caused the crashes.

 

Got my HP 8740w this week so i am a new member of the club!

First thing i did was ordering an Intel X25-M 160GB SSD to replace the hard drive. I got a 7.6 harddisk score now in Windows Performance Index, up from 5.9 . Booting up W7 Pro64 to desktop went down from 55 sec to just 24! It is really quite fast and i am not regretting spending 400$ on it, although that is quite an investment. Sadly the 8740w doesnt support 2 drives and an optical at the same time but with usb3 finding a fast external HDD for mass storage shouldn't be a problem.

I updated BIOS, graphic drivers, SSD tools etc. and ran some benchmarks. On 3D Mark06 it scored an impressive 13046 and thanks to the SSD a PCmark64 score of 12340. Should be future proof for a while...
Thus so far i am really happy: build quality is top, screen is decent, very quiet operation, great keyboard and trackpad, useful HP utilities. Only concerns i got right now are about the batteries running time and the amount of heat under load. I would say it gets up to 45-50 Celsius on bottom and close to the fans, so holding it on your lap for long is quite uncomfortable. But as this is a desktop replacement those problems shouldn't come as a surprise. Same story for the size/weight of the laptop and the power supply, its portable but by no means light.

One thing i am wondering: my RAM windows performance index was only 5.9, with 2x2 1333 modules. Do you guys get a similar score and do i need more ram to get that score up? Or doesn't it really matter for overall performance?


8740w: i7-620, 4GB ram, M7820, 160GB SSD, Win7Pro64, WSXGA+ screen

 

DeTomaso, welcome to the club. Yes, i did see a increase in RAM performance index after installing additional RAM. With 2X2GB i had 5.9. Now with 2X2GB+2X4GB(total of 12GB), i see a score of 7.9..The only low score now is from HDD which is 5.9. But, that should go up when i put my SSD.

 

I'd guess only a few bits need be used to show the extents of 'a color space', with ridiculously huge banding between the steps of colors.

The number of colors in any real, analog, non-digital color space is, infinite; colors are created by relative differences in wavelengths of light, and the number of fractions that exists between one whole number and the next is again, infinite. In the digital realm, it's distinct steps; the more steps the closer you simulate the real-world, analog, smooth gradation of colors in a color space. The bit depth defines how many samplings of the infinite our display can reproduce & show, and how smooth, banding free, and undetectable to the eye and mind, the gradation from one color to the next will be.

 

Good explanation mate. I guess i'll be running in 10bit mode when editing my photos (10 bit RAW files) and 8 bit for everything else until the Aero problem is fixed.

 

Yes, I have seen your pictures and have to say when I first saw them I said aloud to myself, "Holy Siht!" (feel free to correct my misspelling). I'd love to see more if you get a chance to post them. I am hopeful that many of the hardware related bugs, like the loss of the WinKey+Tab 3D will be fixed sooner rather than later, and that Aero support will be provided by ATI and/or HP in the same fashion.

If I am understanding you correctly, what this means is that the DC2 has a superior everyday viewing *display* (i.e. "gamut" of color reproduction) in terms of vibrancy, richness and range of colors compared to Dell's M6500 RGB, even in 8 bit mode, but that in 8 bit color mode its *stepping ability* to progress colors across its (superior) gamut is limited to the 8 bit version of 16.7 million steps vs 1 billion. Did I get that right? Notebookgrail, would you agree with this statement as well?

Have you found the DC2 to be more trouble-free or easy in terms of color calibration than its 8 bit kin?

On a mostly unrelated note, I wonder aloud if 10 bit color support may be better (e.g. no crashing and Aero support) when nVidia's Fermi workstation GPU becomes available for this notebook. Especially since they:
A) go through more testing and certification with their drivers.
B) have had a chance to observe HP/ATI's issues with the the 10 bit DC2
c) even their workstation drivers appear to be updated more frequently than ATIs

 

I agree with lethial. I make separate partitions on all my computers. And it's not about gaining a performance or protecting from hardware failure. Not at all. At some point you will want to reinstall OS. And placing OS on a separate partition makes it considerably easier.

Yes, indeed some programs require re-installation. They highly depend on registry. Many others are not. I've converted many of programs into utilities that reside on my Data drive all the time. They don't use registry or even, if some use, they can easily survive when they discover that there is nothing in the registry when you run them first time after installing OS on OS partition. Many developers offer a portable version for their program - I always take that package (that doesn't require installation, just unpack a simple ZIP file)... Just look for them, if you are interested, and you can find a lot of offers...

Second, to access all those utilities I use my toolbars (actually - three) that I keep, as you may guess, on the Data drive too. So, after I re-install OS - I just add those toolbars and here we go - all shortcuts, that I've created for them long time ago, are in place and ready to start those utilities again. So, I back to environment that I used to very quickly... And because they're organized using nested subfolders - I have quick access to all of them

Third, I use two completely different strategies to backup those two partitions. I backup small OS partition as a whole image, while I backup Data drive with file synchronization software that finds only files that were changes during the time since the last backup. I backup OS once in one or two months, while the Data partition is backed up every week.

Again, it all depends on the way how you organize your computer. And I found that the only way for me to do it effectively is to make separate partition for OS and Data.

 

I haven't calibrated the DC2 yet, waiting for a deal on the HP calibration kit.

Time will tell. But, i doubt as according to HP (Greg), they both go thru HP's testing and certification process. nVidia, on its part has much more than ATI.

 

Anyone in this forum can ask in the HP board (as a registered user) if this issue has been fixed for new systems? I'm asking this because I'm planning to order a 8740w with Intel vPro technology.

Thanks

On the other hand, I've read in the service manual it's NOT RECOMMENDED to use this laptop on your lap (this thing puzzles me a lot) Anyone has some experience using the 8740w in his lap? Of course, under light/medium load, not running games or complex mathematical applications, just surfing the web, reading mail, listening mp3s...

 

And I'd imagine just about all of the 8740w's shipped would come with this -- just based on my experience it has been fixed, but maybe Eric Vasbinde is allowed to comment here now? (as long as he puts a little signature tag saying that he works for HP but this is his personal opinion )

I've used mine on my lap quite a bit (even while running Matlab). It's not the most comfortable laptop just because of its weight/size, but as far as temperature goes it's perfectly ok. I think maybe they recommend against doing this because there are some air intakes on the bottom (especially one on bottom right) which you probably don't want to block.

 

Someone who seemed very much in the know addressed this back around the time the DC2 displays started shipping; many pages back. From what I took from it, it seems it's not something ATI or HP can 'fix'. Nothing is actually broken. It's that Aero uses DirectX, and DirectX/Windows et al doesn't support 10-bit color depth.

Also, Yes, it's safe to use the word 'superior' in relation to DC2. But I can't say for sure this HP has a deeper more intense primary 3 colors than absolutely every other laptop RGB display; I'm just not in a position to be in contact with that many laptops and displays. I suspect this DC2 display even in 8-bit will outperform any other manufacturer's, but that's pure speculation at this point. I'll leave that determination to the experts of NBR when they review one who have reviewed dozens of machines and have a basis to compare and say so.

 

Normally communications like this need to come through official channels. The person who communicated this information on the HP Forum may have spoken too soon / out of turn.

That said, now that the information is public, I can state that the issue was fixed at our factories and thus any NEW CTO custom build machines with vPro should have the fix built in. Any units built before a month or two ago, including pre-builds, may or may not have a problem.

For people with the crashing problem, please try to disable vPro and open a ticket with HP. We will then work with you to get the fix in your hands.

 

Is there any way to check if the issue was fixed besides waiting for a crash to happen?

 

thats just stupid... Dell uber alles

 

I think we all should spread the news that 8740w is just the most expensive piece of useless c"£$&("... that will push HP to at least apologize for the problems and focus on the fix!

 

Anyone with a non-vPro machine try the software fix yet?

 

I don't think the software is available yet.

 

Funny, and here I thought I'd just read that one does have an avenue to getting any affected system corrected. My machine certainly cannot be categorized as you describe; quite the opposite.

 

What about the one mentioned HERE on the last post?

It says non-vPro machines should use this software update

 

If I'm not wrong, you have recently bought a Dell Precision M6500 too and you're very happy with it. Well, the M6500 was released on december 2009, and this machine also had several issues too, most of them already fixed, but this computer was not launched without any issues. And if you read the 'NEW Precision M6500 thread' on this forum (I've read about 350 pages of that thread), you'll notice the RGB LED screen has calibration problems. Users must use the NTSC mode in order to see colors less oversaturated and if they want calibrate it properly, they have to do it with a 1.8 gamma, not with the 2.2 gamma (as established by the sRGB standard). With the DreamColor screen is proven the sRGB emulation is very good with 2.2 gamma. For me it's a bigger pain to live with an oversaturated screen since that issue has NO fix, because Dell designed the screen on that way (it's a wide gamut panel). The DC panel is a wide-gamut screen too, sure, but it has a pretty decent sRGB mode. After all, all of these hardware issues in the 8740w have a workaround and I'm seeing HP is caring about them.

 

I would agree with what others have said about HP caring for and fixing things.

It would have better if HP provided visibility to what they are caring/doing by means of regular updates, rather than have someone from HP (out of own interest) appear on forums and pacify/cool us. At-least HP should have told in private to the affected folks about what is going on. Obviously, if people like xsrx are kept in the dark by HP for a while, it will lead to comments like this and what he has written on the official HP forum.

HP has a lot of communication gap in their hierarchy and it will hurt them big time one day. Maybe, it's the norm of the day for all these companies (HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc).

 

Im ok with problems like RGB screens in m6500 as long as its not crashing my system every few hours making the system unreliable. How can I work in pro industry on something that can crash anytime ? for example.. sometimes I have to render a scene for AE in 3dsmax/maya/etc in my clients location (big tv productions) and the render takes several hours... I just cant trust that the lap will do the job..
We buy workstation because it should be more reliable/tested than all the other machines.

 

Mine hasn't crashed yet, and I've had it almost constantly on for the last week.

 

XSRX is one of the early adapters of non-DC2 8740W. Those are the machines with the problem.

 

You make a point, - it's time to get a replacement from HP

 

I know this. He's advocating advertising that the 8740w is a faulty computer and that HP doesn't fix things. He's wrong. The early model 8740ws had problems, but they're fixed. Early adopters almost always get screwed.

 

We're all early adopters. Including most of you who have received your units recently.

In a way, for those of you who ordered DC2 from the beginning, you could say the DC2 manufacturing problems were a blessing in disguise, since it gave HP enough time to correct the problem.

BTW, those of you who have received your laptops, did they come with vPro?
I wonder how exactly the software update for the non vPro machines fixes the problem.
I hope is not by crippling one part in order to compensate for the shortcomings of another.

What exactly is the cause of the problem?

 

Ah, yes! Finally! The first official Canadian DC2 owner
Since I got both the DC2 and RGB LED (8-bit, same as in M6500), will compare both and post a review. Feel free to request specific tests/benchmarks.
Pics are on the way!



<<< the screen is a total awesomeness!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Aikimox , Great way to celebrate the 4000th post!

I personally was really looking forward to you getting your hands on it to give it a serious once over, and do a critical comparison. Looking forward to really getting the informed word out as to whether the display and driver hardware is as big a cut above the rest as I/many think it is.

 

Aikimox, finally you got it. Post side by side screenies of the DC2 and M17X from all angles.

 

** Waiting for DC2 part# **
It's up to you Aikimox. Don't let me down.

Also, check to see if the display cable is the same. Display cable part# is also important, in case it uses a different one from the standard display.

 

He's going to have to disassemble his computer to find that out... and that might not even give him the answer.

 

10 screws, 5 minutes....
It has to have the LG part# label in the back.

I don't expect him to do it right away.
But it probably won't be long before he starts messing around with....like me.

 

Can anyone get their fingerprint reader to work? Mine has this black thing over it... is that something new or is something wrong/missing?

Nevermind, figured it out.

 

Lol... you remind me I had the same question and have yet to give it any time. Will need to do so tonight.

 

You need to install both the fingerprint driver and protect tools, then restart your computer. Then go into protect tools and set up your fingerprints. The black thing is supposed to be there apparently and it reads my fingerprints through it.

 

Thanx much. You got more rep.

 

Thanks!
Will do the M17X&8740w side by side review tomorrow.
Right now, I'm too overwhelmed...This screen is...just right! Using the default (8-bit?) mode and it makes my alien blush.

Will be done!

You know, I'm gonna do it eventually
But I need to take care of a few things first.
I still owe money for the Int'l shipment.
Looks like with all the taxes, duties and shipping costs I'm still way below 3k and similar config will cost about 4k in Canada (the DC2 might never even become available here).
3 yr Travel warranty is also included

 

No worries... DC2 displays probably won't be available outside of OEMs for a while anyway.

For now the important thing is that you're satisfied with your purchase and to make sure it doesn't suffer from the same problems as others.

 

HWinfo32 reports nothing in the Model/Type section
It does see the 10-bit per color though...
Mysterious panel, lol.
Maybe it doesn't even exist and we're just hallucinating, hehe.

 

I've noticed dc2 panels on ebay for 8740w quite cheap. BTW the new fix is causing system freezes so nothing changed still cr*@*@p