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

Hp's driver didn't break my display brightness adjustments.

 

What is everyone's battery wear like?
Im at 5.1%. That seems a bit high for only having it a little over a week. Also, the battery time seems a lot lower than my previous unit. On my last one I got 4 and a half hours. This one, battery bar is saying 3:20...

 

Try going into advanced power management, and adjust some of the settings, I am getting about 4:37 by battery bar's measure, but I run at lowest brightness, and have a lot of things tweaked in the advanced settings on power management to maximize my battery life.

 

Are you running firefox? My battery wear was high at first, but another user in the battery log forum had said firefox was causing their discharge rate to be high. I also noticed a lot more battery wear when I was using Firefox, uninstalled it and now I am at 1.1% after like 21 days. If it's not that you may have a bad battery.

People with clean install having trouble with BIOS update may try installing HP software framework under the software solutions section of the downloads. It says something about BIOS in it's description, hopefully this is the thing missing on clean installs that prevents BIOS updating... not real sure though...

 

I remember reading a report from Anandtech which said that Internet Explorer is the best browser in terms of the least tolling on battery life. Second lpace was Firefox with Ad Block Plus. Firefox without Ad Block Plus actually takes up quite a lot of battery life.

 

HP software framework fix/enhancement adds support for diagnostic functionality. It says it provides a common set of interfaces that centralize and simplify access to hardware, BIOS, and HP specific Windows drivers.

 

It's an Addon. Search adblock

 

Holy ****. I wouldnt have believed it if I didnt experience this myself. I uninstalled Firefox and went to google chrome and my battery life jumped up to 3:40. Then I checked a little later and my battery wear was down to 4.5%.

How can a program affect battery wear?

 

I don't know, maybe memory usage? I'm just sticking with good old crappy IE. Everyone seems to hate it, but it gets the job done... The Firefox team should consider having adblock installed from the get go, or maybe come up with a way to suggest to user's using mobile computers to install it or their battery will be destroyed.

 

I love IE. I don't know why everyone hates it IE8 is pretty good actually. I could never get used to Firefox, and to be honest couldn't really tell the difference between the two and wondered what the big deal is about. I actually like Chrome, but many sites I visit, mainly personal finance stuff, don't support it.

 

I prefer Firefox over IE because firefox has ABP. Not to mention IE8 opens new tabs slowly.

 

Ht, the only thing i miss about firefox is it prompting my to save my browsing session and restoring it when i launch. Is there a way to get IE 8 to do this without going to reopen last browsing session?

 

So how do you install the new video drivers from HP?? I really don't want to screw up installing drivers.

 

If you have already updated with the methods mentioned in this forum, you're more up to date than HP. If you have HP driver's installed still, I just installed over top of the old ones, but the screen went blank and I had to do the windows key, right arrow, enter to shutdown that was mentioned in this forum. It's not exactly pretty considering HP is an OEM... make sure you wait long enough for the installer to finish before you shut down, about 10-15 minutes or until HDD activity LED stops flashing.

 

I haven't tried it yet, but I remember someone in the Battery Log thread saying that when they switched to using Chrome on their E14, their fans either quit cycling or coming on as much. So maybe less power draw & less heat when running Chrome............

 

Y'all do know that Ad-block plus exists for Chrome as well, right?

 

Quick question for you guys, I received the box from HP and I'm about to send my Envy in for repair, do I keep the battery or do I remove it?

 

I need to get my E14 replaced as it has body dents/scratches, but they don't offer the radiance display anymore. What should I do? I'm within my return policy.

 

Oh god no, what happened to my first laptop seems to be happening to my envy 14. The USB ports are starting to fail it seems. It will recognize a mouse, then stop, then recognize it again then stop, that will repeat for a varying amount of time then it will stop recognizing it altogether. I will have to unplug the mouse and plug it back in to just hopefully get it working again. If anyone has any suggestions as to why this has happened or how to fix it, it would be greatly appreciated.

I should also add that I am having this same problem now with several different types of mice and one is wireless, the other 2 are wired.

I had absolutely no problem like this up until today.

 

Maybe it's the mouse?

 

He just explained he tried three different mice.

 

tried 3 different mice, one is wireless, the other 2 are wired. had the same issues. tried the mice on another computer and they worked fine.

 

Really sucks cause they can't send you a replacement now since the radiance screen is no longer avail. - hopefully they can repair the usb ports.

 

omg I didn't know about this. I just checked hp and they dont have the 1600x900 anymore. wow why did they do this? that just made me feel a lot worse about my problem.

 

Have you tried the above mentioned fix of powering off, pull the battery, hold the power switch a few second to clear capacitance, then reinstall battery and power up? Several online sources suggest this approach.

You can also troubleshoot the USB device in Devices and Printers by right click on the device and choose troubleshoot. Some USB devices need and "reset after resume" setting applied by Windows 7.

Also, you can go into Device Manager and right-click your USB hubs and uncheck the "turn off this device to save power" option. Just some things to try before you pack and ship to HP.

 

Those new ATI drivers posted are problematic. It goes 1/3 through installation before I get a popup that says "Failed to load detection driver."

 

After the memory dump, the computer restart and worked just fine with updated driver...though, I reinstalled the driver once again...however what does memory dump stated?It is physical/software issue?Do I have to worry about it?

 

Acknowledged by Envy tech support (I know, because I called them).

mDP->VGA and mDP->HDMI adapters are fine though.

 

As a web developer, I truly abhor IE because it respects no standards. If you want to get anything done with it, you need to nearly make one page for all browsers and one page for IE.

As for the battery, yes obviously IE will take less battery. It uses the same code that powers the Windows Explorer. Since that is loaded on boot and stays loaded throughout, when you run IE you're running a small client that wraps the web client DLL. When you run FF or any other browser, you're running IE's libraries (which are already a very large part of IE itself) and FF. Of course, that means more RAM/CPU usage and therefore a shorter battery life.

 

ATI CCC installation goes 1/3 through installation before I get a popup that says "Failed to load detection driver."


This happened after I uninstalled Catalyst Control Center and used Driver Sweeper to remove any additional crap. I can't boot into Win7 normally without getting a perpetual black screen that never goes away, so I have to go to safe mode. Can't seem to install CCC via safemode either.

 

Have you tried a system restore to before you removed the old drivers? It might have a hard time setting up the new driver with the old one gone.

I had the issue where it went black screen, full fans in the middle of the installation. I left it for 10 minutes then reset by holding the power button. When it came back, the ATI drivers were updated, but the Intel HD drivers hadn't been...

 

I dunno, I've found just the opposite. With IE you can be kind of sloppy with your coding and it "figures" it out. This isn't necessarily a good thing. But I've done sites where I couldn't get anything to work in firefox, but it worked great in IE, Opera, and Chrome.

Either way, IE isn't horrible as a user. I just ended up using it because (a) it was supplied with Windows and (b) it's supported by pretty much every website out there. Heck where I previously worked I could only use IE. And my bank site supports IE primarily.

 

I went back to safe mode, manually uninstalled both the integrated graphics and the ATI graphics. I can now boot to Windows normally and I don't have safe restore on.


I'll figure something out.

 

Ugh. same thing just happened to me.

Edit: So, I installed and in the middle of the install I got the black screen. I waited a while and then hit the power button to put it to sleep. When I woke it from sleep everything was fine. I was prompted to reboot and the drivers were installed. WHEW.

 

For the envy 14 display drivers i found this works the best for me.

1. Download the new one.
2. Uninstall and driver sweep the old ones.
3.Boot into safe-mode and disable the intel card.
4. Restart into normal windows and install new ones.
5. Restart again, the intel card should be automatically enabled.

Worked for me for 10.3b > 10.6 and 10.6 > 10.7a and 10.7a to new hp drivers

 

I might try that when I get home... Did that do the trick for the Intel card's drivers? I've currently got up-to-date ATI drivers, not sure about CCC (don't know the version from the latest HP driver update), and Intel's drivers are stuck where they were before the update.

 

That's what I installed, it gave me the settings program but not QW itself. It's probably not exactly a dual boot since there are 4 partitions used up by default on the Envy 14 (unless it lives in System Recovery or something), but it's probably on the Windows partition sort of like how Wubi installs work, and then they probably modified the Windows bootloader to load QW first and then Windows. But regardless of how it works, it's not working for me.

 

Hmm. when I tried to install QW on my minimal image restore, it told me it needed to create a partition for QW, and I believe it was going to have to completely wipe the drive to do so, so I opted out.

 

Ugh this is so frustrating. I was absolutely loving this laptop up until it decided to stop recognizing mice.

 

Just on a whim, try running Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, along with CCleaner and Glary Utilities. Let it clean up crap on your machine and see if that helps. Be sure to run the registry scan multiple times until it comes up clean. Then reboot even if it doesn't ask you to.

I saw someone mention earlier about doing the power down, unplug AC, remove battery, hold down power button 30 seconds. Has worked for me on a couple occasions with weird glitches. Give that a try if you haven't already.

 

Probably mice driver issue?or win 7 mice driver get corrupted?if the USB works with external hd,etc. then its not ur USB port.

 

I read your other posts and you said you tried 3 different mice, and same problem? Have you tried OTHER USB devices such as a flash drive? Try stressing that port by copying/reading large files to/from the usb drive. If you are getting the same problems with flash drive, then we can rule it that your E14 has faulty USB ports.

 

HP info on setting up, reinstalling Quick Web:

Setup and Use HP QuickWeb Applications - HP Customer Care (United States - English)

 

I've installed the updated Catalyst panel but am unable to configure my switchable graphics hotkeys. Switched to integrated, but cannot switch back.

EDIT: SOLVED NVM.

 

Im running a full system scan with avast right now. I already ran ccleaner a couple times. I may try the other stuff but I have a feeling it won't solve my issue.

And I tried that power down, remove battery, etc. It didn't solve the problem.

It does recognize the external hard drive, I haven't tried copying/reading files from the external hard drive so maybe ill try that next. I don't have a flash drive with me. I tried connecting two ipods with three different usb cords and the laptop wouldn't acknowledge them.

And some more info on the mice, the wireless mouse is a logitech v220 cordless optical mouse. i bought it with the laptop. it has worked perfectly up until today. it started just working intermittently, then i would have to take out the usb stick and put it back in to get it going again and eventually it just stopped working altogether. I thought for that it just had a dead battery even though I haven't had it that long. But I tried several different batteries and had the same issue.

I gathered two old wired mice and ran into more of the same. Interestingly though with the wired mice I would at least usually get a message saying it is installing the device drivers...then it would say the device driver installation was unsuccessful...device unplugged. Even though I kept it plugged in the whole time. I usually don't even get that message with the wireless mouse. For both mice I will often hear that thump noise the laptop makes when a usb device is connected to it then the noise it makes when you take a usb device out all while it remains plugged in.

I have tried reinstalling the usb devices in device manager, I tried a system restore and a million other little suggestions hp gave me and nothing has fixed the issue.

I feel like the windows update might have done it as there seemed to be a critical update a few hours before I tried using my laptop and ran into this problem. However, I did a few system restores, with the latest going back as early as I could (8/12) and I still have this problem. I also quickly turned off windows automatic updates after the restore in case it really was the update that did it. I also tried a system restore followed by reinstalling all of the windows updates and I still have this issue.

EDIT 1: following the earliest system restore I could do (8/12) the wireless mouse actually worked for a little in one of the usb ports. I tried putting the stick in the other one and it wouldn't work at all. Tried putting it back in the first one and it wouldn't work there either anymore. Had the same issues with the wired mouse as I did before.

EDIT 2: Full avast pro antivirus scan came up empty.

 

I am pretty sure only Microsoft competely understands the memory dumps. Usually BSOD does mean a bad piece of hardware, though software could cause it. Maybe you could try memtest and a HDD check, though I'm not sure if you can actually check your video card unless someone in here knows of a tool that will check/test it for errors. Hopefully it was just you putting the computer into hibernate/sleep whichever you use that caused it, incomplete driver installation I would say could cause a BSOD.

 

This is a shot in the dark, but maybe disable usb selective suspend in the advanced power settings. Like I say, a shot in the dark...

 

As a web developer, what are your thoughts on Apple's Safari browser? Is it a crappy browser like IE?

 

Didn't fix it

 

maybe you could check in the Event Viewer to see if it is reporting any kind of information. Sometimes it logs stuff that goes wrong and can help you fix it.