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

so... i was just testing my power adapter... i had the voltmeter scaled at 50 volts and while testing there was alot of fluctuation in voltages.. then randomly one time when i put the testers on it the voltmeter exploded! it literally made a POOF sound with a small fireball and the the smoke came out and you can smeel the electrical wires inside the voltmeter burning. so i gues that means my a/c adapter is faulty! sweet!

 

Could someone recommend to me the video driver version that doesn't keep your laptop in a perpetual black screen state after being asleep or closed? Don't know if i want to revert back to April 2010 version.

 

Should I get the i5 520 or i5 450? 520 will cost an extra $100 is it worth it??

 

Yeah, I had one of these HP "slim" adapters left from a previous HP laptop, and when I tiried to use it with my Envy, I would sometimes get messages about my 14 not being attached to a full power (or something like that) adapter.

 

Yeah I feel this. It happens when I run my fingers along the casing around the keyboard. It actually sort of feels nice.

To the point at hand, this laptop has a 3 pin plug made for English sockets. I am currently in Korea which has two sockets. The voltages are the same. I have a converter from the two pin to the three pin socket. Earth is sacrificed. Now the laptop is in a metal shell, unlike most other laptops that have a plastic one, meaning Earth is required to ground the laptop. I went to stores around Korea to check if the Envy 14 in the shops had this problem. To my surprise they do.

I was thinking of buying a proper power adaptor for the Korean plugs, but after finding out the Envy 14's in the stores do it too, I thought otherwise.

If you're bothered by it, you could run a wire to a metal rod placed into the ground (Assuming you have Earth in your plug). But that's a bit excessive.

 

My harddrive seems to make a high pitch sound every once and again. It is not the cpu nor the fan.
I swapped out my Momentus HD for a Seagate LP, same thing. I reinstalled the original 320GB, ame thing.
Is it just me?

 

Bump for consideration.

 

Is it strange that I get just about the same battery life on integrated battery, and dedicated?

 

Arg. Mute button's light won't come on. DId as the instructions said on the front:

"Mute light not changing color? Install HP Media Smart Smartmenu.
See Justin's driver thread or HP driver downloads for it."

Installed the latest one for E14, not working. WTH?

EDIT: Also, any chance the Envy 14 Beats Edition adapters will be compatible with the regular E14s?

 

I would check your power setting.. Maybe it is set to powersaving (for the wireless/bluetooth).. so it is slowing down and/or disconnects to try to save power.

 

Does anyone have a fix for the slow resume from standby?

My old HDD Dell from 2007 resumed faster than the Envy (3-5 seconds) and my Envy has an SDD. I think it may have something to do with the DVD Drive because it checks it each time.

 

uncheck the dvd drive from the boot menu in bios.

I've had my envy for 1-2 months now, I am going to test the battery again this weekend.

So far I got an A+ in ISA server 2004, and A+ in exchange server.
Only 1 more test.

 

How much would it cost to get a 160GB SSD?

 

No one has input?

 

It still checks it when resuming from standby and takes a while. Thanks though.

 

hp 10.7 drivers. really there's only two options for the hp (amd + intel) drivers. it's the newer one.


as for the mute button issues.

mine works fine without any HP software so...really I dunno what causes it to screw up sometimes (the old "power off, unplug, yank out battery, hold power button down for a half a minute or something") should fix it.

if not....man I dunno. I'm up on bios f.13 now and most of those led issues haven't reared their head since bios f.06 for me.

 

Yes, at that price with the radiance screen, it would be a decent deal.

 

I'm going to pass on the new drivers.

As for the LED button, yeah, it's batty alright.

 

My mute button light works fine, and I've done a clean install without installing any of the HP "smart" software. I'm using the F.13 BIOS although I think it was working on F.06, too, and I'm using the latest IDT audio driver. Has your mute light ever worked? Maybe you have a bad mute light.

 

I used to get black screens every so often after resuming from sleep or lid closed. However, I downloaded the ATI Catalyst Control Center version 10.10 and I'm running the 8.782 ATI video driver, and since then I haven't had a single black screen -- not one. The only negative effect I've seen from this driver version is that the brightness function keys don't work; however, I can press Windows key+ "x", which brings up the Windows Mobility Center that has a brightness control slider bar. I think I'll stick with this driver setup even though it's not officially supported.

 

It stopped working after I got it back from the technicians...hmmmmmmmmm....


Any theories, people?

EDIT: Far as I know, they didn't do a clean install. And they didn't fix the cosmetic scratches or the huge gap that's been created. I'm going to have to fix the gap myself during winter break when I'm bored with nothing else to do.

 

hey curious about the pricing of hp envy beats in CA and US (cheapest in world?)

I5
ATI 5650
4GB ram
320GB

WITHOUT the beats headphone

how much will it cost in the above mentioned country?

 

You might want to reinstall win7 yourself and see if that's mute thing works. Fixing an aluminum not going to be fun...the only way I see to fix it is to order new parts.

I dont have problem with the electric vibration on my E14, could be because of US electricity which lower and probably more stable.

 

$1000 + tax for California buyers. That's for the base config Pretty expensive if you ask me...

 

normally how much the tax will be?

cause im comparing my country SINGAPORE and other countries price of hp envy beats.

 

Write a description of everything that's happened to you with your envy and email it to HP support, CC'ing The Consumerist.
I solved an issue with Dell's customer <s>service</s>disservice by CCing them, they had good advice and useful contact info.

 

If I remember correctly, tax is based on your zip code. So mine would be 10.25% --yes yes, I live in a crappy city, with crappy city officials, with crappy policies, and nobody who votes because they're either unregistered or ILL*G*L.

 

Hi - I've taken delivery of my new HP Envy 14-1190ea today after owning and putting up with my Envy15 for a while.

The 15 has a number of issues, and I was happy to see the 14 address these, but many things aren't detailed by reviews, so I thought I'd list the improvements here.

1. Build quality is much much better. It feels Mac quality, not just look like it is trying to be Mac quality. The 15 was not great - the plastic around the screen was bad, and the palm rest moved and creeked.
2. The power supply is so much smaller on the 14. Ok, so I went from an i7 to an i5, but still, there is a massive difference in the power supply. It even has a USB port on it in order to charge things.
3. Heat - no issues with the 14 at all, the 15 got way too hot and when the fans kicked in, it was unacceptably loud. You could not put the 15 on your lap.
4. Trackpad - OMG, so much better on the 14. The settings are much better too, with the option to dissable the pointer from moving when your fingers are in the button areas - this makes dragging and dropping so much better. Multitouch is better too, but not on par with Apple yet.
5. Rubber surround on the screen goes all the way around - much better.
6. USB ports are much more secure - plugs don't wobble around at all.
7. Off button on the trackpad is less likely to be triggered accidentally as it need a double click, instead of the long hold. You can also turn this feature off in the settings.
8. Preinstalled software is much better and there is much less crap to remove than the 15 had.
9. Screen angles much further back than the 15, which is a very welcome change.
10. Lights on the side tell you what is going on, unlike the 15 which didn't give any info - i.e. when in standby, there were no lights on the 15 at all to tell you this, so you have to open it to check.
11. Illuminated HP logo on the rear of the screen serves no purpose, but I think its cool
12. Optical drive - obviously. Not present on the 15.
13. No stupid shortcut buttons down the left on the 14! On the 15 I would always hit these accidentally, causing all sorts of problems (like printing during a game!!). They made typing a real pain.

Ok, so my 15 was a higher spec, but I hated my 15. This is why I bought a 14, and I'm very happy that I stuck with the Envy range, as although they look similar, they are very different machines. Battery life is double thanks to the switchable graphics.

Oh, I don't miss my 1080x1920 screen either. It sounds great on paper, but on the 15" screen it is too much for general use (although I understand some will be more interested in gaming and hd videos).

Anyway, I'm sure this has all been covered before, but I felt like sharing my findings.

 

What's CC?

 

Update on my ENVY 14 problems.

After 2months on hp service in Norway, I'm sending it back to the United States for service (gonna cost me like 400$ in shipment (). Its going trough an ebay seller. The computer makes an high pitch sound that hp norway could not fix, and it has dust inside the screen.

What are my chances of getting a new one ??

 

Actually they added disable pointer moving when fingers are at bottom feature pretty recently to the Envy 15 with a touchpad driver update. Otherwise, your points are pretty spot on.

I also noticed the particular model you got has the 1366x768 screen. can you (or anyone here for that matter) comment on how that screen compares to the 1920x1080 screen on the Envy 15 in terms of color, brightness, viewing angles, and contrast?

 

Carbon copying. Sending a duplicate copy.

 

Virtually nil. HP's unwritten policy is that it needs to go through at least several repair rounds before a case manager would offer a new one or refund.

 

I'm having a problem with my drivers... everytime I play some graphic intensive game the screen goes blank. Tried re-installing to 10.3 but my CCC is still at 10.8?

 

All E14 makes high pitch noise if you use the USB ports or in some case, if you use BT. That is intel CPU fault, not E14, that's why they have no solution. You probably just spend $400 for nothing, as some people actually get back their E14 with scratches, etc.

You need to reinstall the whole thing, removing ATI driver all together. Windows will install standard VGA adapter (screen might look much uglier) and then install the driver from HP website.

 

How do I uninstall the whole thing?
I've tried control panel -> uninstall programs and I uninstalled the CCC and everything with it, but when I rebooted, windows looked normal because of the integrated video card? Then, I re-installed 10.3 and my CCC was still 10.8. So, I probably missed something...

 

So, since nobody likes me and helped me with my question I'll ask it again I guess.

Is it strange that I get just about the same battery life on integrated battery, and dedicated?

 

dunno.

how much battery life do you get?

I mean, the ati's powerplay is probably pretty good.

 

So outta curiosity, what good would an SSD do my Envy if it's already opening everything super duper fast?

 

*shrugs* do it fasterer? load stuff faster?

I mean apparently the envy 14 has a slow boot no matter what (something with switchable graphics angering things) so that won't change much.

 

I'll get some exact numbers for you in a bit.

 

Hmm..This pretty much has me sold. I've seen the E13 at Frys, and would assume it's the same quality as the 15, since I would agree that it indeed felt "plasticky." I hope you're telling the truth about E14, mang So how is the Brightview screen?

 

the SSD and regular HD is a HUGE difference! not just the speed, heat, the battery will improved as well. I'm not sure about the slow boot, mine boot pretty fast.

 

Lol, you have to try an SSD to know how fast it truly is. Opens most things instantly, saves power, can take quite a bit of shock, and it's silent. You'll notice the speed when you search for files, move large files around, etc.

 

well slow is relative.

roughly 30 seconds to me is still a fast boot. But I remember some people complaining about it and noticing that if they uninstalled the switchable graphics stuff and only used the intel it booted up twice as fast for them.

 

Very true MagusDraco. Although it is still a reasonable boot time, compared to my Envy 15 its slow. Both have SSD and the E15 boots in half the time

 

Ehhh, I'm happy with my boot time.


I think it's my Asus that now requires an SSD upgrade. Starting to run really slow. It's long overdue for a reformat as a lot of the drivers seem to have somehow gotten corrupted over the years.

 

The HP Case manager can't get an update from the repair department on why they haven't replaced my hard drive after having my laptop for 3 weeks. Now the case manager is saying she may have to build me a new laptop since she isn't hearing back from the repair department. ? It's amazing that they claim to have no way to contact the repair department other than by sending some message via their computers. They claim they don't have phone numbers for the repair department because "they are in the 21st century" despite the fact that it takes more than a few days for them to get a response back.

 

What about the dust in the screen. is that a good reason ?

 

From whats been said in the thread, HP uses some fly by night thieves as repair people. I will be doing repairs myself so I know my computer won't be shipped to some "technician" who scratches it up or screws around with it all the while not fixing a thing.