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

I'm not sure if this guide is accurate, but it does give somewhat of a rule of thumb when or when not to remove the battery.

The BatteryCare software that this guy developed doesn't seem too bad either.

 

Isn't there an option in the BIOS to bypass the logo screen so you can see what's POSTing behind the scenes?

 

So is the Envy 14's touchpad somehow still unlike the MBP's?

 

I only deleted my recovey partition since it was taking up too much space. I just left the hidden 200mb partition and hp tools partition alone.

 

I sent all partitions to hell

 

Yes, but again, don't think too much about it. Just use the laptop. Not only that, but the heat issue I can understand in a rig with a GTX 480m with i7-840QM where it's going to be pumping out 100W+ of heat. In the E14, the difference will be negligible and not worth the headache.

I've had my Sager wtih GTX 260m and Core 2 Quad Q9200 for about a year now and have it plugged in 95% of the time and game on it regularly. Battery life has dropped less than 5%, and I've cycled it down to 3% before auto-shutdown a couple times to recalibrate. GPU temps go into the 80's as well as CPU temps in some cases.

JUST USE YOUR LAPTOP. Batteries have come a long way in the last several years. IMHO, I'd rather lose a couple months of battery life than forget that I have the battery removed when I unplug the machine on a few occasions and lose work or cause issues from a hard shutdown with the power being yanked off.

 

my last 6 cell battery lasted a year before dying

 

That reminded me, after a clean install and not reloading the HP support assistant, I never found any 'calibrate battery' features in Win 7. Your post implies there isn't one, any particular 'tutorial' you recommend for Li ion poly batteries?

 

Thanks for the replies! Hmm..what to do..

 

Assuming the clickpads are the same dimension, you think maybe HP is waiting to run out of their current stock before moving on to the new ones? I hope we don't have to wait till Rev2 to get them, I'm planning on ordering an Envy in August so hopefully there's more info by then.

 

Thats how long the E 15's took until this newest F 02A BIOS.... Not sure what they chanegd, but I like it

 

You can back up HP tools if you want to. You don't really need the recovery partition once you're done (going through the agony of) burning recovery discs. The 1 or 200 MB "System" partition is installed anyway by windows, so you might as well delete it during the clean install.

Like the other guy said (sorry forgot your name), send em all to hell.

 

Got it. Thanks.

 

Bum battery then. I've never had that happen in the dozens of laptops I've owned/used over the years. Heck even an old Sony Vaio laptop I had for seven years, the battery still got me 30 minutes of run time after four years!

My Dell Vostro 1500 that is three years old and sold to a friend recently, still gets a good hour or more of battery life with web surfing, etc.

Maybe quality of the battery has a lot to do with it too. One would expect with the Envy, their "premium" line that they wouldn't skimp on the battery, but who knows.

 

Then I'm guessing thats something you can't fix. Well for processes wise I still have 43 on startup now and still 41 seconds.

Sigh..

 

the 6 cell from a dv5t i bought last year is completely shot. lasts no more than 5 minutes.

would it make a difference if we were able to program the charge of the battery to only 40% (since it seems most "experts" say to store batteries at 30-50%).

 

I read somewere that win 7 improves startup times after several restarts with the same configuration, there is also a thing called 'superfetch' in win 7, which I'm not quite sure how it works, but it's supposed to improve app loading times, not sure if this may also 'learn' the startup config and eventually speed things up for you.......

 

Like I said before, you can charge it to 40% or 50% or whatever and then go to Power Options > Battery Meter > Battery Life and tick the box. This stops the battery from charging and the computer uses the AC Power cord power.

 

However to improve SSD performance superfetch is often recommended to be disabled.

 

Soooo...does the Envy 14 use a Macbooklike clickpad or not????

 

?? that would kind of defeat the purpose of having a battery powered computer.... youd get like 1.5 hrs with a 40% charge.

IMO just use it and don't worry, like Wingnut says...

Put another way, if it lasts 18 months and costs $75 for a new battery, that's 13 cent a day.....

 

Made no difference for me when I turned it off except I noticed Adobe CS4 took about 4 seconds longer to load, which was noticable as I open that dozens of times a day ( actually the +4 was only after a restart).... Mine is on and doesn't seem to slow the boot time in any way....

 

Geez, you read my description which I thought was self explanitory. Simple answer yes and no. Apple has a single button which is the whole clickpad, the current envy has 2 buttons , bottom L & R under the pad. The new synaptics as in the article link above has the 1 button type more like Apple. Which also has win 7 issues with doing a right click which apple does not use, ther will have to be a 'gesture' or something like a of 3 finger click to = a right click.... The Apple also can usse 4 finger actions which the new synaptics will match... Now that I probably just confused you more , are you happy? Sorry just kidding

 

Hey so I was planning to give cinebench results with the 450m but it appears some others have already done so. I found that my single core rendering and shading were in line with others' results. HOWEVER, multiple core rendering was way lower at only 4388. This is only a multiprocessor speedup of 1.25 for me. I'm hopefully just overlooking some simple setting. Can anyone offer some advice to fix this issue?

EDIT: just checked cpu-z, found that there is only 1 core, and 2 threads currently operating. Any ideas?

 

I thought the results posted were only like 2-5% better for the 520m but I can't remember. Plus I don't really understand the meaning of the numbers so I'll just take the 450 since I don't do much of anything beyond the norm.

 

But wait just a second. How is that different from Apple's? On the MBP, you can press down on the bottom left side for a left click and a bottom right side for a right click! That would make the Envy 14's clickpad identical!

 

Not for booting purposes but for prolonging the life of the SSD by freeing up some ram so you don't have to write to the SSD a million times.

But I didn't actually turn it off yet so if anything this is the speed of my bootup with the help of superfetch

 

Wait, are all the MBP gestures supported on this touchpad also?

 

Might affect you if you plan to r/w the whole drive every day for 5 years. With wear leveling and TRIM it's going to far outlive your notebook. Kind of like the battery discussion above, don't worry about it just use it.

 

thanks for the many responses!

what is picasa exactly? i googled it and it told me google's photo storing software....

so if i clean install my ssd, lojack won't go away? cool beans.

 

Anandtech just published its Laptop Buyer's Guide: 14-inch and Smaller, and even though the Envy 14 is really 14.5 inches, it got a spot in the article.
Laptop Buyer's Guide: 14-inch and Smaller - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

"Mobile Powerhouse: HP ENVY 14

Basically, this is the most power you can stuff into a 14” chassis. HP’s new Envy 14 has an optional Core i7 quad core processor and the Radeon HD 5650 graphics card in a slim 5.25lb aluminum enclosure, and somehow manages to still retail for a semi-reasonable base price of $1099 ($1349 with the base i7-720Q quad-core).

This is especially impressive because the Envy 14 is fairly thin as well, at a constant 1.1”. The Envy line in general has been well designed, and the 14 is no exception. They’ve also been consistently accused of being clones of the Apple MacBook Pro line, and the Envy 14 doesn’t do a whole lot to change that perception. The two lines do share quite a few design characteristics, including the flat lid with tapering edges, the rectangular shape with filleted corners, flat contours and even surfacing the whole way around, etc. Even things like the backlit, black chiclet keyboard, slot loading DVD drive, sealed in battery, and “floating” screen are similar. What was that line about great artists and stealing?

But once you get under the skin, none of that matters: the Envy 14 is available with the fastest mobile processors on the planet, and the best graphics card available in a 14” notebook. One potential issue: heaaaat. The larger Envy 15 was reputed to have cooling issues, especially with the quad core processor option. With the same amount of power stuffed into a smaller form factor with less area for heat dissipation, this one’s almost a lock for a ton of heat output. It doesn’t help that the aluminum chassis conducts heat, potentially creating an effect similar to the older MacBook Pros, where the outside of the notebook feels much hotter than normal notebooks do, even though the internal temperatures are within normal operating range and the cooling system is working as it should.

So as long as you don’t mind the hot casing, the Envy 14 is the mobile powerhouse to get. Good build quality and a decent amount of portability to go along with it’s quad core processor and midrange performance graphics card makes it an easy pick for raw computing horsepower."

Seems pretty obvious that they don't actually have one, they're just making assumptions based on the other ENVYs. Quite lame IMO, because heat really ISN'T an issue as far as I've seen, there are many other issues haha.

 

Don't think so. Inertial isn't from what I'm told.

 

Yeah, there shouldn't be a large difference. I seem to be having a processor issue since all the other people who reported 450m benchmarks had scores nearly TWICE mine.

I'm really confused since CPU-Z only shows 1 core and 2 threads. Does anyone know what's going on with my processor? (note: I did a clean install)

 

Yea I do use it since the pro outweighs the cons. But It doesn't really help with boot time as I've booted the laptop plenty with the same things on bootup.

 

I remember when I first bought my dv2610. The ports were all stiff unlike desktop USB ports etc., and just required breaking in. I was so delicate with my new toy, and was actually afraid of breaking it. However, after a few weeks, I got used to it. Stiff is actually better IMO, cuz I've seen/used quite a few shi**y looseygoosey ports (=halfas$).

 

no, none of those gestures are supported. they are not identical. not sure what zeth is spewing but it's not right. by default, on the mbp, you can click anywhere to get a click (but the higher you go up, the stiffer the click gets since the hinge is located near the top). to get right click, you click with 2 fingers. you can also set a region where u tap to have right click but u need to set that up in system preferences

on the envy, the only clickable portion is the bottom part, which is designated to act as left/right mouse buttons. on the mbp, the entire thing clicks down but u face resistance if u click from the top

 

From what I've been reading, yes, it's still unlike MBPs. It's the same trackpad as on the earlier envys and other hp lappys..

That's why I asked if I could just buy synaptics new one and install it my self.

The way I see it, I don't think any other notebook can compare to the MBPs touchpad as of now.

Still tho, I'm gonna tr to get one of those ones on the link below when they arrive ogle whenever so I can install myself.

Synaptics Introduces Four-Finger Multi-Touch and MacBook Style TouchPads - Laptop News - TrustedReviews

 

Define inertial in terms of what it actually does. I believe that is what synaptics calls 'momemtum' and or 'edge motion'.

When is your envy due? because I know the feeling of waiting for the new computer, but a lot of your questions really should wait until you get your machine and see for yourself, it's just tough explaining a lot of this stuff without having it in front of you to actually see it ot try it.....

 

Will this happen if I plug it into my LCD monitor?

 

Getsures beyond MBP are fully supported, you just have to go to synaptics site and download the Scrybe software.

 

This isnt a very productive post. It's posts like this that makes my forum experience long and grueling lol. I'm on my 18th or so page, and just got home LOL

 

LoJack is embedded in the BIOS supposedly. It'd make no sense for reformatting to affect it. Otherwise, we'd be tossing 50bucks for something that's supposed to combat crime.

 

That was what I thought would be the case. I went with the 720QM too and wanted to upgrade it to the i7 840QM, would I have to send it back and start the entire process over again? I do have a warranty and they said I can purchase through them and get upgrades, but not about the price difference. I'm sure I want the i7 840 though

Thanks, and as gimmicky as it seems, I was hoping they would be better lol . Which in-ear headphones are the best, or have the highest impedance? And I agree the sound card is a step up.

 

Bro, I never deliberately circulated false information. If you read the ?s that come after each of my sentences, you would know that such a punctuation symbol is used to denote a question. I posed a legitimate question mainly out of my lack of experience with HP's touchpad.

Also, I've used the Macbook Pro in the past, so I know what I'm talking about. You are correct, but your information doesn't contradict mine. Yes, you can press down to click to get a right-click. You can also two-finger tap to get right-click. But you can ALSO press down on the bottom-right portion of the Macbook Pro to get a right-click.

Don't "spew" that someone else is spewing misinformation. Try getting your own information down correctly before blowing chunks.

 

Most of the expensive ones are very very sensitive. The IE series of senheisser are all low impedance high sensitivity. My IE7 are 16 ohm and 125 dB/MW. So I'm guessing try and find something around 32 ohms with a sensitivity of around 100. That should stop the hiss. But don't take my word for it as I don't own a pair of earphones around that specification.

 

Can someone post the phone # to call for phone orders ? Also, is that the same number to call when you want to price match a purchase?

Thanks

 

888-999-4747

I think that's it. Got it from this page. Not sure if it's the # you call for price match.

 

actually, u were wrong in this regard; i just didn't quote the right thing. MBP has a single click that's similar to the blackberry storm. the envy consists of 2 hinges to denote the left and right buttons. but i see your question mark and notice you're simply implying. it's just your excessive uses of exclamation marks make it seem like it's fact when it's not. i apologize if i have offended you since the word "spewing" does carry a negative connotation.

 

I would wait for some type of confirmation if the 17 X40QM's actually do have a lower power idle state. I have only seen 'rumors and speculation' intel still just has the full data sheets (300+pg PDF) listing the X20 series, the X40 series specs link send you to the old '09 X20 data sheet. Since they are shipping I would think we'll see battery numbers in short order which should confirm if there is an improvement....

 

Bump for confirmation that this is the same # I'd call for pricematching the purchase? I'm gonna attempt to call tomorrow if I have some time at the office.