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

Well, as no one seems to have any answers to my battery issues, I guess I'll calibrate my battery, and then call HP.

 

Not sure what kind of advice you are looking for. If others in the runtime log thread are getting twice as much as you, then there must be an issue with your battery. If you already ran your battery down from full to near empty, that is a form of calibration.

 

I'm going on my 3rd and last one and will see what happens in a couple of weeks. I really like the power but the build quality is not there and I don't suck it up. I talked with the CEO office today and basically was told if I have issues with the next one then there's always RMA. They really don't care.

 

The battery testing program HP says to use says my battery is fine, (and HP says it is right 99% of the time), so I'm guessing that my issue is very complicated (not just a case of a bad battery), and that HP will not just send me another battery on a whim. Hence I had hoped someone else here would have a suggestion.

 

you're not the only one who has the battery shown as good but half battery life.

there was someone else in the batterylife log folder that had the same issue.

he's waiting on a new battery to see if that fixes it, otherwise he'll have to RMA it.

 

I was googling around and I happened to find a review of the envy 14, and I saw that there aren't really any 'official' reviews linked in the OP or anywhere O could find, so I thought I'd share this

Here is link for anyone interested: HP ENVY 14 Review - SlashGear

 

howd you find the CEO office #?

 

GDDR5 memory? That's not right unless HP gave 'em some sorta super Envy 14

 

Thanks man. If he had the issue yet HP still sent him a battery, then I guess I will call.

 

Has anyone:

-figured out how to disable the left and right mouse button areas of the trackpad
or
-successfully replaced the optical drive with a hard drive

 

part 1: not yet but there IS a tiny deadzone at the bottom of the touchpad like halfway down from the line to the bottom of the touchpad. it extends all the way across.


it's kinda finicky though. (Not sure if it only showed up with the latest drivers or if it's on the older drivers too)

part2: as for replacing the odd with a hdd...not sure. should be doable if someone finds a 9.5mm odd tray.

 

Protoid--thanks for the hint. Didn't know laptops had a "what to do when you close the lid " option in Power Settings. Set it to never sleep, hibernate or do anthing when the lid was closed and removed the "require password" option. Now it really doesn't even shut off or do anything when the lid is closed. Fine by me. Always turn it off with the start button when it is left alone for any length of time anyhow. Yes, I did recommend Envy to my sister and nephew--the rest was just BS.

 

has anyone checked out how the failure non-radiance display looks?

 

So I called HP and they said there is an known issue where the Envy 14's battery will be registered as fully charged, even though it isn't, and therefore not able to completely charge. Apparently the engineers are working on a BIOS update, which will be out within 30 days (she said that was the maxiumum time it would take). It does seem reasonable, as my battery seems to charge amazingly fast, yet lasts only 2 hours. Of course, if the BIOS update doesn't fix it, I'll ask for another battery.

 

What's the program people are using to check if their battery is okay? I'm seeing that mentioned around a bit.

/can't find in first post. D:

 

Well, here's the result after completely filling your SSD blocks one time. I basically just copied a bunch of backed up files, ISO's, mp3's, game patches, etc so it filled my entire drive so I was certain that the drive had written to all blocks at least once.

Below are my results. First one is basically a fresh run of my machine, after a fresh install of Windows 7, so even after factory install plus fresh install there was no way the drive had all blocks written to at least once.



Here it is after filling the drive, then deleting the folder (too big for recycle bin so instantly deleted). I then shut down the machine and powered back and let it idle for 20 minutes or so.



write times were definitely affected. Not sure about that 4k test, it's actually better after the full disk, and not sure what QD32 means either, but from what I've read it's the most important for regular OS disk writes. I redid the Crystal Mark test after the system sat idle for an hour, because apparently this "self-healing" I've read about is supposed to happen while the disk is idle. I will let it sit overnight and see if it changes anything. I don't expect it to fully heal 200GB+ in an hour, but one would think enough would be cleared up for a 1000MB bench performance test. I'll update tomorrow morning after the system sits for a length of time. I won't let it sleep, just have the monitor turn off.

 

ooooooooh. neat.

 

Uh. That looks bad. But I've never cared about SSDs until about a week ago. For the rookies like me, what's going on here?

 

Just a quick video I made with some gaming + screen viewing angle comparison with the Macbook Pro 13". Feel free to add to the 1st post if you'd like. Thanks for watching:

YouTube - HP Envy 14 Screen Viewing Angles + Gaming

 

Go into HP support assistant, and click on "troubleshoot", then the "power" etc. button.

 

I fixed my whine well at least for now...

heres the post http://forum.notebookreview.com/6549248-post106.html

 

I don't have that, as I did a clean install. Would you happen to know which folder it's in swsetup?

 

Sorry, apparently most of the 256GB SSD drives (Samsung) have shipped without the TRIM feature enabled. To summarize, TRIM is a feature that allows the SSD to reset used blocks as unread blocks. Without it, even once a block has been written to then erased by the OS, it's still considered "written" by the drive. Windows 7 can send TRIM commands real-time so that the blocks are reset and appear as open, or free to write. Without this, the system has to clear the blocks first before it writes to it, this affects the write performance, as you can see, dramatically.

Intel 160GB SSD's have awesome 4K writes to begin with, have TRIM enabled, and even without it have a "garbage collection" utility that will clean it up manually. Samsung has no such utility.

Apparently Samsung drives are supposed to have a "self-healing" algorithm in the controller that is supposed to do this "garbage collection" or TRIM type command when the drive is idle. Otherwise once all the "blocks" have filled up once from a factory state, your performance is greatly reduced as can be shown in these benchmarks.

 

For anyone who's too cheap to get the Intel or Samsung SSD options for the Envy, there's a Kingston 64GB drive on sale at newegg for $100 today and tomorrow only.

Newegg.com - GUERRILLA ALERT: 6 sizzling deals available for 48 hours only!

Seems like a decent drive, has TRIM support and all that. Just a bit small, but I think I'll use NTFS junction points to get around that. I've got two spare laptop drives and then the one from the Envy if/when I finally order that, so that shouldn't be an issue.

 

If I am not mistaken, the first generation Intel X25-M series has idle-time garbage collection. I'm also fairly sure most Samsung SSDs have idle-time garbage collection. Idle-time garbage collection is standard across most modern SSDs.

The second generation of Intel X25 SSDs supports TRIM, and while the first generation does not, the garbage collection generally keeps it running at an acceptable performance level.

Last I had heard, Samsung released a TRIM enabled firmware for some of their SSDs. I don't know about the 256GB SSD that you guys got.

Either way, people on NotebookReview seem to overreact about anything they can. Even if a SSD doesn't support TRIM, if it has idle-time garbage collection, in general it's going to run fine, and you likely will never realize there has been any degradation in performance simply due to the fact they're so fast.

I'm just saying, if you don't get TRIM, it's not the end of the world.

 

Understood. But the problems as I see them:

1) I tried to install the firmware update Samsung SSD - Downloads by booting from a USB drive (since I don't have a desktop to hookup a SATA cable to). It didn't work for me. I've read reports that HP has custom firmware.
2) There's no info that I know of from HP or Samsung that says there's idle-time garbage collection.

It would be nice if HP gave us more info, but it doesn't sound like anyone else has been able to get it.

 

So I just arrived back home from my vacation, and I really couldn't be happier with mine. Maybe pin it on the fact that I've never owned a laptop before, but I love this thing. Build quality looked top notch. No dents or scratches observed so far. HP logo was centered. I did observe the rainbow-specked spots on the monitor when looking at it from an extreme angle, but so long as this doesn't intrude on frontal viewing angles I'm okay with that.

The fan is cycling on and off, but the sound doesn't really bother me that much going from my gaming desktop. I don't observe a whine. Ordered an i5 450.

I feel the positioning of the heat vent and the disc drive a little odd. Why is the heat vent on the right and the drive on the left?

I intended to do a clean install, but after the Momentus XT sold out on Newegg that put a stop to my efforts. So I'm just rolling along out of the box, and it shows a little. I'm currently running 105 processes, which is around double the number I'd be usually running on my desktop. But all the hotkeys and touchpad are functioning correctly for the moment.

 

It seems that only recently has HP been putting Samsung SSDs with firmware VBM1CH1Q (TRIM enabled) into the Envy 14s. Not sure what people can do about updating their firmware though at this point.

 

I agree that this is odd / bad design. I have an i7 and the right vent gets extremely hot when running multiple vmware OSes or playing games. A bit disappointing...

 

I also find it stupid that HP put the eSATA/USB combo port on the right. I mean, what the hell? If I want to hook up an eSATA external, the cable is right in the way of my mouse.

HP did a terrible job at placing the I/O on the Envy 14.

Other than that, I don't really have any complaints.

Edit: I should say, I'm not trying to be negative. Everything else so far is perfect. I'm loving this notebook.

 

What's the proper way to update CCC / my video drivers? Been having some random video game crash problems on both my 14 and my friends.

No signs of it being hardware related, as windows is still running in the background.

 

That Samsung TRIM enabled firmware was released in January and still seeing drives with no TRIM support. I attempted that firmware update, but since it's an HP specific firmware it won't update.

I am testing to see if idle time GC is true, but if you do a search it seems it is not necessarily the case. People have left their systems idle overnight, as I am doing, and have not had any improvement.

It is not overreacting. If you pay $565 for a drive, you expect it to perform with certain expectations. Not only that, HP told me before I ordered that it was a Western Digital drive, it wasn't, it was a Samsung. They also told me it supported TRIM, it does not. They need to be accountable for details like this especially when you're spending this kind of money. If I knew it was a Samsung without TRIM I would have seriously reconsidered my options. But now my only option is to order a new one and return this one, but that would compromise the $544 I'm getting back from BCB. Not gonna happen.

This is my first HP and so far I am not impressed. I've dealt with a lot of Dell stuff and had great customer service. They didn't hesitate to ship me a replacement drive when mine was acting funny. HP wants you to ship in your whole machine for two weeks. Dell didn't flinch when I made three returns of 2407WFP monitor and on the third time I told them what was wrong and a guy actually hand picked one and sent it to me, it's been perfect ever since (three years plus?)

 

So I just got my envy and i'm working on a clean install using a burned win7 dvd, I restarted, hit escape, f9 to get to boot devices, chose the internal dvd drive, pressed any key to boot from dvd, and then it showed a progress bar for about 10 seconds starting the windows setup. After that it showed the windows 7 4 balls swirling around with a black background and now is just a black background. It has been for 30 minutes. Any idea whats going on?

Also does anyone know what page the post with which order to install drivers is?

Thanks

 

The proper way: "Get some drivers, let 'em install. Sit at the black screen until the hdd light stops blinking some 5 minutes later and hope it installed right, reboot (hit power button, better set your power button to reboot not put it to sleep) but don't hard reboot unless you don't hear it start to shutdown when you hit the power button.


then it should work. if it doesn't and you come back to a blackscreen you go to safe mode and run system restore.


then you instead install from a beta driver (either 10.6 alpha or 10.7 open gl 2.0 beta) and do the same as above.

 

One of the first reviews on the Envy 14

Not sure if anyone else has linked to this yet, but it looks like it's very positive.

 

yeah. Only iffy part is the GDDR5 memory in the 5650. it doesn't have that. it has DDR3

 

It said it had a 5830 in the beginning too. Inconsistency doesn't really foster confidence in reviews, people.

 

Win7's XP compatibility doesn't work for Brood War. I still get the inverted colors even if I run it to be compatible with both Sp2 or Sp3. I originally had SP3 before I installed Win7.

 

will this work with the envy? Amazon.com: HP Slim Travel Power Adapter: Electronics

any other recommendations for small/slim chargers? .. dont want to carry that brick to school everyday.

 

also, in the short video, he calls the mini display port a firewire port, and sorta ignores the fact that both audio ports have audio out, but that's an easy mistake to make. He does say 5650 in the video tho.

Still overall it just feels a bit like they're kissing a to hp cuz they like getting review models. I mean i love my e14 (besides no TRIM ) and i guess a positive review is good, but i think we have to wait to see what the bigger reviews say. My favorite is engadget, and they liked the envy before, so i think they're gonna really like this one. Cnet didn't really like the last envys, but i think they'll be a bit nicer to this one. Still probably are going to harp a LOT on mediocre battery life and bloatware and cost and trackpad, and ignore all the good stuff like those poo heads usually do.

 

I just edited the "small glass" 3RVX theme for the Envy (it now shows 1 volume increment per button-press)
It's being hosted here indefinitely. Feel free to mirror it.

If anyone has a request, PM me and I'll consider it (and probably do it: I have a huge amount of free time. My boss is on vacation and has nearly nothing for me to do. School starts late August)

 

Guys lemme know what u think of these screen settings

In ATI Desktop Properties I set:
Gamma:
Red-.85
Green-.85
Blue-.70

Brightness: 22
Contrast 85

 

Haha you don't know power bricks 'til you have a large sager with about 1 hour battery life: NotebookReview.com Picture was about the size of my old one...

Another one I've seen mentioned for the envy was the Targus Universal Charger

 

Too bad HP didn't want to put the C300 in the Envy 14.

Here's the benchmark for the C300 in my Envy 14.



If you're going to spend the money HP is charging for the 256GB, save your money and get the C300 instead.

And in case there was any need for further proof of how bad the Windows Experience Index is as a benchmark, it rates the Crucial RealSSD C300 as 7.5, while it gives the Intel X25-M a 7.7.

 

Does anyone hear white noise when using headphones and not playing any music or anything at all? Anyone know how I can fix that?

 

Wow. That's great. I like it a lot! Nice work!

 

Wow strange, I was just on the Intel GPU and my screen just got completely out of whack (No contrast, hard to read thin text). Reverting to high performance solved it and it stayed when I went back to Intel. Dunno why.

 

I saw someone post about the cooling system a few pages back, and I must say, after the cooling system on my "old" stolen DV8t that this cooling system is far superior. Everyone just be glad HP didn't angle the heat vent up and AT the display. You couldn't shut the lid because of the angled vent on the back. It would literally cook the computer. Mine just arrived today and I must say that I am really impressed with the computer. So far I had a Macbook pro 13" that I returned for overheating my nether regions. It also felt like I was getting a dose of low voltage electricity through the solid body aluminum chassis. After that it was the DV8t which as I mentioned was stolen, and now it is the new Envy 14. The best so far is the Envy 14, but I've only had it for one day so it very well might be the "high" of the new purchase arriving.

 

Where every color is extremely whited out? I had the opposite of that issue, it occurred occasionally when I would switch to ATI graphics. It gradually happened more and more, to the point where I couldn't fix it . I can't remember an issue since I reinstalled my ATI drivers though

 

Nope. I cranked it up all the way and don't hear any sound at all. This is pretty amazing, considering I would get static from alot of other audio devices I would use (older laptop, turtle beach).

PS: I am using Bose earbuds and the soud is amazing