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

Speakers are good, not great, but good. Touchpad seems pretty good as well. And the cd drive isnt to quite when it sucks the disc in, but it does do it fast!

 

Someone gave directions to click on a tray icon that had a brightness option.

 

I love optical drives that suck the CD's in XD

 

I believe all slot-in drives make the same loud noise as if it was crushing the CD/DVD into bits and pieces. Painful noise...

 

Cool, can you run a cinebench multicore benchmark for the 450m ?
http://www.maxon.net/index.php?id=162&L=0 It's downloadable here.
That would be cool.

Also if you want to get 75% luminosity I think you can do it in window's portability management center, there's a slider to set luminosity through windows.

 

Scratches? Idk man. The interior zippers are exposed.
It might scratch your laptop from there lol

 

The e14 would have been better without one

 

You can generally change the brightness in the battery/power options meter that Win7 provides. It works the same way with my Inspiron 1420, though it isn't any more precise than fn+up/down, at least not with this computer.

 

Is the lid even scratchable? I mean, it's already got like etchings on it. Might as well personalize it even more...

 

there is a very VERY slight processor idle whine. It isnt constant, more of a *weeeeee wee weeeeeeee weeeee weee* kind of thing. I dont think it is loud enough to bother me much. I think I'll just wait for a fix to come out for it from HP or anyone else who finds a solution. It is definitely not a reason to return it.

 

Agreed.
I'm putting a fast 320GB drive in there if possible.

 

Haha, I heard that noise a few days ago and almost lost it. Turns out my little brother was feeding a bunch of old CD-Rs into the CD slot(!) of my dad's document shredder.

 

I personally like the good, old fashioned pop out drives as well. I am always afraid that a slot load will break and leave something stuck in it and you can't replace it with a hard drive if you ever feel like it.

 

opinions, opinions

 

omg?! the 450m has a processor wine aswell :|

(sorry double post) thread was going fast so i expected someone to post by then

 

true. Really I don't care about scratches.


I just 'bought the sleeve since it was 4 bucks

 

I repeat, the 450 whine I have is hardly noticeable and doesn't bother me.

 

That's not good.
I was hoping that the whining would stay isolated to the 520.

Edit: The post above is more likeable
a previous laptop had a nearly inaudible whine that didn't bug me.

 

I just got mine. Box was beat all to heck. There is a dent in one of the hinges. I've never seen so many pop-ups and bloatware!

 

plus to be honest, I dont really sit with my laptop while its idle anyways.... if I'm at my desk, I am doing something on my laptop.

Burning the recovery disc now, it takes 4 and it takes forever!

 

SO it appears that getting a unit with some sort of CPU whine is a strong possibility.

I don't know if I should put that sort of warning up on the first page yet. Might wait until early next week to do that since more folk will be getting their Envys today through Tuesday.

 

i wish i could hear it for myself. Usually things are blown out of proportion.

 

2.0 can you pm me also, much appreciated and thanks.

 

Sure thing.

 

Guys... Don't look for the cpu whine because once you notice it, it's going to frustrate you.

 

Lol this is exactly how I feel. Probably blown out of proportion.

 

You only have cosmetic issues then?

 

alaskajoel, could you tell me how to find the settings to do this? I cannot find any fan control settings in Win7. Are you using a 3rd party program to do this?

Thanks!

 

My Dell Inspiron E1505 has a similar whine to what you guys are mentioning -- I also had a similar 'fix' to someone else earlier in this thread: turn off the bluetooth radio.

When I first bought the E1505 four years ago, it was almost inaudible. However, it only got worse until I eventually figured out it was related to the BT radio. The fact that it gets louder over time is the most concerning part to me...

 

I don't notice any whine at all, but then again I'm in my office with a box fan blowing so that could be masking it.

Currently slogging my way through burning the recovery discs so I can do a fresh install of W7. The amount of bloatware on this thing is insulting. For someone like myself or other users of this forum, it's not such a big deal because we know what we're doing. I feel deeply sorry for anyone who buys an HP system and doesn't know how do deal with this terrible software though. What a nightmare.

 

Yep, It's not all that bad but I'm not all that impressed with the computer...jmho...I'm sending it back, and going to see if I can find a dv6t at a big box store. Who sells them?

 

That was me... Here it is again with more details....

Brightness Adjustment Settings

Just click on the battery icon on the task bar, click 'adjust screen brightness' and there is a slider at the bottom of the power plan window that opens. After you find the level you like you can use the 'adjust plan settings' option for locking your prefered brightness when you boot up, simply move the small slider under the plan settings and click 'save changes' and it's locked in to boot at that level until you chage it. If you go to 'Advanced plan settings' you can actually dial in exact % for both normal and 'dimmed' brightness levels. You can do this for each of the 6 individual power plan settings.... Have fun

 

If it's not constant unlike cpu whine, it could be just hard drive noise. Try turning bluetooth on and off to see if it goes away tho.

 

@Harb67
How much of your 160gb SSD was already being used right out of the box. Im just wondering because I've never done a clean install before and I was wonder if I end up not doing a clean install how much space am i going to be missing out on.
BW
-mac

 

You may want to try these 'sound tweaks' to improve speaker volume level and quality, they make a huge difference on the E 15, although some settings may need to be adjusted for the 14's unique speakers..

http://forum.notebookreview.com/5668647-post3614.html

 

Here's how it came configured from the factory:
C: - 84.9gb of 132gb free
D: - 2.30gb of 15.9gb free (recovery partition)
E: - 92.3mb of 98.8mb free ("HP Tools" partition)

I'll post up what the HDD usage is right after a fresh W7 Home Premium x64 is done.

I got sick of ruining DVD's by picking up the laptop and turning it around while the recovery discs were burning (cant help it...the 14 is so pretty!) so I plugged my iPod in and formatted it for temporary recovery data storage. Hopefully I can just pull the stuff off of that and archive it on my desktop system for later use and not have to have an iPod dedicated to being my 14's recovery device

 

ooooh gawd yesssssss !!!

ok um.... i like love this display.

the keyboard tray fit not so much but... ummm gotta get back to play. tty'sL

 

With a clean install and removing the partition and turning off some win7 things (hibernate, reduce page file size, reduce restore point size etc.) you can get 144Gb free of 149 total with just the OS and necessary drivers....

 

So i looked at the pics of the opened Envy from the "review" link on the first page and wasn't able to spot a "if broken, no more warranty" sticker.

What are the chances of us replacing the thermal paste without voiding warranty? Or am I just blind and the sticker is there lol.

 

I have an E1505 also with the whine. No Bluetooth on my computer though so its not that. I use RMClock to undervolt the CPU and also set the C States so theres no whine and it uses less power

BTW the whine is more of an Intel issue than an HP issue. I wouldn't hold your breathe on a new computer fixing it. Maybe you could listen to loud music for a long time and get some hearing loss for high frequencies.

Also try going into the power settings in Windows and setting minimum processor usage up a bit.

 

I am attempting to run some overclock tests myself, but AMD GPU TOOL hard freezes the laptop every time the utility is stated (before even overclocking anything) anyone have any ideas?

 

The setting is found under control panel's power options. Go into the advanced settings of one of your power plans, and it's under processor power management - System cooling policy. I just set it to passive, and it still kicks in when it needs to, but it seems to me that it's much left often. Also, with the bios set the way it is, the fan is also running very softly, so it's less dramatic when it does need to kick in.

 

What a damn stupid design. Mine is suppose to arrive tomorrow and I'm not excited anymore.

 

No stickers on the E 15's and even if there were there is nothing in the HP warranty specifically stating that you cannot open it up. I changed thermal paste, un RAIDed the drives, added my own RAM and modified some rubber spacers in my personal E 15 before a BIOS update bricked it, had to go back to HP since no recovery method would work, they said nothing about my mods/changes and they did open it up to re flash it....

 

Thats great! I wonder how replacing the thermal paste to MX3 or something else will change the temps.

 

AMD clock tool V 9.26 is the only version that works with the 4830 and 5830 HERE

 

<s>My initial thoughts on the Envy 14 here:</s>


[Mod edit] Posting links in posts to personal blogs is against forum rules.

 

Meh, that version hard freezes upon app launch as well.

 

Oh I forgot to mention (and I don't know if it WAS mentioned before):

The display is NOT glass. It looks and feels great, but it is in no way, shape, or form an edge-to-edge GLASS display. It's some sort of plastic. It flexes easily when you put pressure on it. However, I'm not complaining per se; just letting everyone know. It definitely doesn't feel or look cheap, and unless you really sit down and poke at it you wouldn't know the difference.

 

That's random - I was just trying this utility my self to oc the gpu, and it completely froze everything for me too.