*HP ENVY 14 & ENVY 14 Beats (1XXX series) Owners Lounge, Part III*

Hi VonCrisp,

Thanks for your response before! As it turns out, when I follow the instruction (Intel first, reboot, AMD second, reboot), the primary monitor on my laptop works great. However, once I connect, via HDMI, my ext monitor, things arent too great. For instance, everything slows down to an incredible degree. There are artifacts on the screen. If I click on something, it takes ~5 seconds to pop up. Then, once a window is shown, it starts flickering. I've had to remove the software and go back to using only the AMD driver in comparability mode with win7 and not having the Intel driver at all. The things that bother me the most is that I cannot change the screen brightness on my laptop screen and that a phantom monitor keeps showing up all the time in the display settings panel. Nevertheless, I appreciate your work and help!

 

Indeed this is a bug. Some are able to fix it by "
("Duplicate monitor" and "projector only" might not work properly, but "extend desktop" should)

"

You should try the new Crimson drivers. Maybe the bug is fixed in those.

 

I am not looking for 100% compatibility but is display port compatible with these drivers ? I am not looking to play games , just occasional manual switching . I havent updated myself with the reccent developments


I decided to give windows 10 a test with the latest leshcat drivers . I installed it on external hdd via esata . As soon as i was done installing the leshcat driver i decided to test the external monitor functionality using dp. The drivers are not yet mature for dp . It experience flickering , sluggish images as if it was loading via wifi . Also i was not able to set my external display to Full HD . The driver ui went slow on dp

 

Has anyone found an ideal touchpad driver solution for Windows 10? I was using Reil's driver on Windows 7, but it now fails to run at startup on 10.

It seems like some of the settings may have stuck for me, though. General speed/acceleration seems to work as it did before, as does most two-finger scrolling. Oddly, two-finger scrolling works in web browsers and explorer, but not in settings windows and the start menu. Whole touchpad clicking works. Two- and three-finger clicks work

I can live with this, but I do miss three-finger swipes.

Trying to adjust Synaptics settings results in an error-filled window. I'm on the same driver that I had under Windows 7 (I don't have the driver version on hand right now).

 

Anyone having issues with Wi-Fi dropping out constantly in Windows 10? Win 10 has really revitalized my Envy 14-1000 cto, but the Wi-Fi disconnects and cannot be fixed without restarting. Device manager shows it's disabled when it dies and I cannot enable it. Restarting works fine. I've tried all sorts of drivers without help. It's brought me to the point of either going back to Win 7 or getting a new laptop. Any help?

 

Hello, guys! Newbie here. Just installed W10 to my Envy 14, installed latest Crimson package drivers, everything seemed well, up until I launched CS 1.6 game and found out that performance in game is terrible, low fps, cubic graphic AKA minecraft etc. I think I am always running on Intel HD, and not switching to AMD's card. How can I switch and control which graphic card to use? I have tried these things for now: 1) disable Intel HD in device manager > result: monitor weird scaling, game not launching at all. It seems like AMD didn't kick off at all. 2) Turned "high performance" in every setting of AMD and Intel's card software > result: no response at all, still bad gaming experience. I remember when I was running Windows 8, I played StarCraft II, Dirt 3 without any hickup on AMD graphic card, everything was smooth and neat. But now even CS 1.6 is lagging. Solution anyone? or, if it was already discussed here in forum, please navigate me, I will read it and figure out myself.

 

Just wanted to double check if this method is still working. as almost half a year has passed. Anyone who is using this trick please respond

 

Well it looks like this community has all but died since I was last here! My Envy 'died' in the summer of 2013 and I haven't been on here since. I did everything I could think of to fix it back then and finally concluded it was the motherboard. Seeing as it was out of warranty and I didn't really have extra money laying around (the motherboard was also very expensive at the time), I laid the Envy to rest and used an old HP Pavilion laptop....until now.

I finally got my Envy back up and running and it wasn't the motherboard, but the processor all along! I replaced my original i5 460M with an i5 560M (cost me $14 on Ebay).

Running Windows 10, this laptop still feels very fast to me (perhaps I have low standards?). I don't do any gaming, but for every day browsing, word processing, emails, Netflix, even Photoshop, this rocks it. A SSD and 8GB of RAM really bring it together.

Only catch so far is I am stuck on the Intel GPU until I find a suitable Windows 10 driver for the AMD GPU.

Anybody still out and there and running Windows 10? Would love to hear from you!

 

I'm still out here and using my Envy 14 some. It is still pretty pristine and stays covered with a towel on the bench. Dust it off once/month for updates and cleaning. MS sure wants me to upgrade to 10 but I know it will break some of the functionality that I enjoy having. Especially drivers for the AMD graphics and the manual switching between graphics cards--I don't care for the auto-switching that came somewhere along the way. Figure I'll keep using the Envy until Windows 7 dies then will probably need a new laptop with whatever OS that is happening at the time preinstalled and with all the bells and whistles working as they should. Have never regretted buying the Envy 14--a nice piece of work.

 

My Envy 14 is going strong but slowing down for every day/work tasks. Plus only have about 10 min battery life. I just bought a new Xps15, but honestly feel like I could have just bought a new battery for my Envy and got like another year out of it. Will retire it 3 months shy of 6 years of excellent service.

 

Glad to hear your Envy has lasted you so long! Overall the Envy is a well built and designed laptop. For my purposes, this laptop still fits the bill. If it was still equipped as originally purchased it would probably be feeling rather sluggish...but I have upgraded the processor, RAM, swapped the HDD for a SSD and upgraded to Windows 10 (all for little to no cost). Unfortunately, HDMI output does not work with my current W10 drivers which is a real bummer...but other than that (and the old annoying CPU whine...) I still love this laptop and will keep it for another 1-2 years.

Although if I were to upgrade, the XPS 15 would be one of the laptops I would consider. How do you like it? I also like the new Inspiron 15 7000 "Gaming Series" laptop (even though I don't really game..)

 

Awesome! Yeah, drivers for Windows 10 can be tricky. Auto switching is not as nice as manual switching, but for me I prefer having Windows 10. The only thing I REALLY miss on W10 is the HDMI which doesn't seem to work with these W10 graphic drivers.

 

Install our latest UnifL 16.2.1 and it will work. I made sure that the HDMI is fixed in that.

 

Awesome!! Thanks for the tip. I was running UnifL 15.11 before and the the HDMI was not working very well. Now with 16.2.1 it appears to function normally! I haven't gotten a chance to test a lot of things (HDMI audio, games, 'Radeon Settings,' etc) with 16.2.1 but so far so good.

I really, really appreciate any/all hard work you've done with the UnifL releases! Without UnifiL, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be using this laptop anymore. I'll test it out over the next few days and let you know if I find any bugs.

 

Thank you for those kind words! The first generation Envy laptops have a special spot in my hear ; ). I am still rocking an Envy 17 2xxx and it still serves me well!

We have received one report where the HDMI in combination with games was having some sort of FPS issues. We are not certain if this is an isolated case or even part of the HDMI bug that persisted.

Do let us know how it works out!

kind regards,

FunkyMike

 

I've been using UnifiL 16.2.1 for a few weeks now and I can happily report that it still works great! HDMI works, HDMI audio works, games work (although I don't do much gaming..) and it is pretty reliable. Occasionally my screen will flicker and I will get a notification saying that the AMD driver stopped working but then recovered. Not a big deal to me, as it is pretty rare and always recovers within a second or two. Unless it starts happening more often I doubt it will be an issue.

Also, not really a problem, but when Windows boots from a restart/shutdown, it will get stuck when displaying the little Windows logo and the spiraling loading dial freezes...after a about 5 seconds the screen flickers and then it continues to boot normally. Again, not really an issue but something to note.

Anyway, just thought I'd give you an update!

 

Would someone who upgraded to Win10 mind typing down the steps involved?

I guess it takes some special drivers, do i get AMD drivers first or that UnfiL you talked abot?

 

Been a bit cautious about getting Win10 since I need the AMD graphics to work, also need the HDMI.

Is it just a matter of installing win10 or would I have to download drivers from AMD and others first? Where do i get the UnifiL driver?

I short step by step guide would be awesome, perhaps not too detailed but just the major steps and what order to get it working?

 

http://leshcatlabs.net/downloads_unfil/

This link will take you to the download page for Leshcats latest driver. Can't be much help as to the upgrade process as haven't done it myself yet. Been considering it before the "free" upgrade to W10 ends next month. Were I going to attempt, I'd create a system image of the existing OS and files, let W10 work its magic, install the Leshcat drivers then attempt to find all the other drivers needed to make all the bells and whistles work.

Hopefully someone will do a step-by-step--don't recall but it might have been done somewhere in the previous pages. Guess a search is in order.

 

I bought a new battery last year . Envy 14 works ok for me on power save mode 1100mhz , balance for few hrs . In high performance mode the l laptop switches itself off after few minutes . I am looking to squeeze a year more from it . Either i will be looking for xps 15 good deals or xps 15 2017.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

 

Checking in for the 1st time in what seems like forever. Actually had kind of forgotten about this site. Using my Envy 14 to type this, and still use it a couple of times a week just for typical web stuff, though I'm mainly a desktop guy. Mine is still stock and has been a great machine, and the only problem I've had is 3 small dust specks under the screen that are only noticeable on light backgrounds, but no big deal. That being said, I upgraded to W10 right before the deadline, and am still evaluating it. At first, the touchpad was horrible, skipping and not registering, especially when scrolling. Also, the boot process would hang up on a blank dark blue screen, but by powering off and starting it again, it would then boot completely, but slowly. But as of a couple of days ago, these issues have seemed to somehow resolved themselves for now. The fans seem to come on a little more frequently than I remember. Everything else that I routinely use works okay. Still, I'm going to wait until I'm close to the 30 day limit and decide then if I want to go back to W7 or not. Either way, I will probably put in a SSD I have and maybe upgrade the ram if it's not too much $. It's been an awesome laptop, and I still love this screen, especially for viewing my photos.

 

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