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

best mod ever

 

Aw lame, I missed the sweatshop arguments. Darn you, sleep. Who needs you.

So has anyone's shipped yet? :X

 

Oooooo a swing and a miss. You lucked out.

 

If this is true could you inform me on what the differences are between the 450 and the 520? I was originally planning on getting the 520 but this has made me think otherwise.

 

Grand total of differences between 520m and 450m:

520m has a faster single core turbo mode (2.93Ghz) both run at 2.66Ghz on dual core turbo mode.

520m has comm suite which you won't need unless you know you need it. edit: this means that if you have no clue what this is, you don't need it.

450m has a higher DMI Bus which well, you won't hit the 520m's bottleneck, probably (uneducated guess)


everything else is the same.

 

I'm not sure if this has been verified previously, but according to a voodoo specialist whom I was able to talk with at HP he is 100% sure that the CPUs are soldered in and it would be very difficult to do a CPU swap. This basicly kills my interest at this time as I was looking for something a little more modular.

 

All Intel CPU's are designed for Zif sockets. Envy 14 is no exception. See page 73 of the service manual. Link on first page.

 

Caught up on the thread, good to see its been kept interesting. I don't know if the Medal of Honor beta works in Germany, but if any of you guys want to test the gaming ability of the 14 with it, I have a few extra beta codes that I'm not using. I don't know how much it would push the system since I don't have a PC with a graphics card to play it, but I figured I'd leave the option out there for you guys.

 

1. okay, i'm pretty sure voodoo is non-existent anymore under that name.
2. have you looked at the service manual posted on page 1? In it, it clearly shows the processor being removed and replaced, so you may be pleasantly surprised.

EDIT: Djmack8000 was shot by 2.0 - he is too quick to the draw for you!

3. So I missed about the last 75 pages, anyone care to enlighten me with any new details pretty please with a cherry on top?

4. My orders on HP still says "Order in production (Estimated to ship on July 7, 2010)" GAH! BLAST!

 

i didn't state that I myself was on a tight budget. I in fact aligned myself perfectly for buying this laptop by selling my Lenovo u330 for a pretty penny and salvaging a broken macbook that i sold for almost $600, so altogether I am not spending a dollar and still have $300 to spend on a future ssd if the momentus xt doesn't live up to my expectations. Also after discounts and a 10% ca sales tax, I am getting my rig for under $1099 so thanks but no thanks in your advice to look into other machines. Maybe you should follow your own advice though.

 

Requesting permission to post a real life story about sweatshop labor

Its not to start a debate, just to shed some light on the problems big companies face.

 

Ok. But I'm not going to allow any responses to it. Hopefully it's factual. I'll rub out commentary.

Like this:

90% of Western companies employ sweatshop labour. <s>And I hate that and think we should nuke them all. </s>

See what I did to the commentary?

 

With your previous line of posts regarding this topic, this is akin to saying "I want to continue the argument, but want permission to prevent anyone who has a different opinion to be allowed to respond."

 

Not exactly true there mate.

The 'comm suite', which I assume you call it because it gets better PCMark Vantage scores for the Communication Suite tests, includes hardware acceleration for AES encryption.

It will impact the performance of your encrypted communications, including your home wifi and connection to https websites. So I think everyone will actually use that, its just whether you think it is worth the extra money or not.

It will also increase the speed of any AES encryption tasks you may perform, which I agree that the majority of users won't use outside of the communication scenarios listed above.

 

May, I have one?

 

True. But I was under the impression that those new instruction sets have to be used by said AES encryption things (and aren't widely used yet)

 

How much faster will wifi and https sites be? lol

In other words, for the average user (not some encryption freak), is it really worth it?

 

Rule of thumb. An upgrade isn't noticeable unless the performance increase is 20% or higher. It's not hard and fast. Sort of written in stone with chalk. But the exceptions to this rule are few and far in between.

 

Okay, so I've read about 200 pages of this massive thread. One thing I've noticed is that many people are going with the 1 DIMM of 4GB RAM over the 2 DIMM of 2 GB RAM. I understand that you may wish to upgrade to 8GB later, but other than using VMs, does anyone actually need 8GB?

 

At the moment. No.


Unless you're running photoshop and Maya and some sorta video editor all at once.

 

I just ran the Final Fantasy XIV Benchmark

1280x720 : 1439 points
1920x1080 : points not visible because non resizeable benchmark window is bigger than screen, only possible with external screen

 

Have you tried Microsoft OneNote?

 

OK, here it goes:

I currently studying Civil engineering here in Denmark and have just gotten my bachelors degree. (yeah totally irrelevant). As a part of my education I was on a study-trip to Dubai, where we met up with a head of a Dubai office for a well known company that build cement factories. Normally the responsibility for the construction site lies with the company that own the "to be build" factory, but for this story that were not the case.

Because the company is Danish, and they had the responsibility for the site, they tried to apply the same safety procedures that apply here in Denmark (Quite strict).

Here is what happened:
They gave away free safety shoes to all the workers.
Result 1: The workers took of their shoes when pouring concrete, as they didn’t wanted to ruin the shoes. It was the finest pair of shoes they have ever owned.
Concrete is very corrosive, so standing in the concrete with bare feet is not good for you.
Result 2:
They sold the shoes on the local marked. So the company had to buy the shoes back, and give them back to the workers. This circle kept going, as it was cheaper for the company to buy them back, than to enforce some kind of control-system.

Basically it was near impossible to enforce the high safety standards in a country that is underdeveloped. They simply don’t care about safety in their current state of development. And it is just as hard to enforce better working conditions, as most of the workers are so under-educated that they don't understand the long term effects of their way of working, so they simply just ignore it. It's sad, but true.

This is of cause not 100% comparable to HP, as HP has chosen to build in China, where the cement factories is bound by where the raw-material is situated.

<s>So before you pass judgment on a company, please keep in mind that it not easy to force the same high standards onto these people. I don’t blame HP for getting their laptops build where it's cheapest. Everybody with a sane business mind would do the same.</s>

 

engi school doesn't even need an uber laptop.

usually it's just a decent dual core processor and something that CAD or Pro/e likes if you have to use those programs

 

i could have gone through my entire undergrad (just graduated this yr) without a laptop. for my major (biochem), it's not a necessity at all

 

I couldn't of.

At least three of my classes required a laptop in class (for tests among other things)

edit: Now I mean these classes were VB.net and Decision Support Systems (which is Doing magic in Excel and then using VB for Applications in Excel).

Third one was Simulations and used Arena (again tests in class, involving building a model for the test within an hour or two)

Industrial and Systems Engineering.

 

In Denmark its close to impossible to graduate without a laptop.
Everything goes by mail, intranet etc.

Im currently using an older HP DV2000 model, and it handles the heavier programs as CAD and so on fine. Matlab takes some time to boot though.

 

I much prefer random nude friday.

 

I find it truly amazing that you refer to the card as "trash" when the review was particularly glowing about the HD 5650. Not to mention that the graphical glitches were found in TWO games out of the entire suite tested. That, to me, makes it clear that the problems encountered are either:

• a driver issue, or
• a game issue.

The hardware itself is likely not responsible for the glitches encountered. If the reviewer had mentioned artifacting or other known hardware-related issues, then you might be able to conclude that hardware is at fault. Though, in those instances, it might be that the cooling is inadequate, hence the artifacting, etc. That would then lay the fault on the laptop's manufacturer, not the video hardware.

For the record, the HD 5650 is not trash. It is indeed a pretty nice piece of graphics hardware. This I can offer from experience putting that and similar cards through their paces.

 

Also if we're gonna be completely offtopic.


Might as well post that one thing from Pro/e that I'm still proud of ('cause I did the final project in two days...they were giving us two months).

It's in a spoiler tag since it's got a few big images and ya know. If you don't care, you can easily skip it.

Spoiler

The screw up.



Hey it actually was finished. It's a coin exchanger. You put in a quarter and get two dimes and a nickel back. It was a pain in the to make especially since I forgot how to do everything in Pro/e besides extruding (rectangles) for the most part.



Internals. Man this class was a pain in the and I took it several years ago

edit: I found these hiding on my photobucket and eh. gotta make use of the photobucket account some how.

 

Hell Yer to OneNote!! I used that for all my University Modules

 

OneNote kept bugging me on boot so I reinstalled office and didn't use it.


...I'm not in school anymore but *shrugs* what's so nice about onenote?

 

God bless the slide rule! Slide rules FTW! Don't need no stinkin' new fangled puterin' thing-a-magig.

 

i never understood what onenote was....

i liked it for quick note taking on the fly but windows 7 has stickyntoes so that fixes that

 

It's just a relatively easy way to take notes. Combines the speed of typing with the more dynamic note-taking features, like being able to type anywhere on the page and things like that.

 

New aes or comm suite doesn't change anything to wifi or https speeds.
Because wifi and https protocols are still using standart AES encryption instructions.
To benefit of the new AES instructions you need to have a software that was coded to use the new aes instructions. That is to say very very new encryption softwares.

It's like have the wrong socket for a newer cpu lol.

That said in recently updated players and codecs the comm suite boost when playing movies is good but just overkill, any c2d can already play 1080p flawlessly...

 

Greatest piece of software MSFT ever made. IM(not so)HO.

 

Pft, T-squares are where it's at.

 

OK, I like the way you used the spoiler tag! Well done, my friend. Well done.

 

Pen and paper is still the way to go for taking notes.

I also had gotten a laptop but ended up only playing games on it more than doing actual work . E-mail is a pain without laptop but you can still manage between desktop and student center.

 

asdlj';l...

Dammit I was just using word (most of the time til my last year word 2003)


That would have made things much easier.

 

lol i give up reading this forum for 2 days and about 100 pgs come up. did i miss anything important? did erath post anything new?

did more of yah get your envy's?

 

nothing, absolutely nothing.

 

Spoken like a true politician...

 

Oh, while we're all extremely on-topic and focused, I have a rather important totally E-14 related question to ask:

2.0, who is that in your avatar? I wanna say Bob Geldof but I'm only 22...typically things in black-and-white are out of my sphere of knowledge.

 

almost at 500 pages and not 1 US person has received their laptop haha.

 

One Note was awsome with a tablet... perfect for note taking. Never tried typing on it though..

also as an engineering student in the netherlands we are required laptops that can perform. We are given licenses for all the programs needed and we are expected to have a good enough laptop to run them. Pretty much needed a laptop every day and had to be able to run software like catia on it.

pretty awsome how each student got a license of catia even... that license costs 4 times what my tuition costs at least. Maybe its cuz its aerospace.. gotta have the best

 

the features such as

- voice and video interviewing capabilities (also good for voice recording lectures). the recording is then a clickable icon on your notes page.

- the integration with Outlook such as i could flag something in my notes that i am to follow up. Flagging it allows me to set a time and date i need to review something which is sent to Outlook. When the time and date comes Outlooks alarm notifies me as well as sends me an email to my phone if i am not at my laptop.

- when doing web research it has a screen clipping feature that makes OneNote upon clicking the clipping feature become transparent and allows the user to select a part of a screen but dragging an rectangle around some content which then appears on ur current notes page with a reference automatically included of where the clipping came from.

- when taking notes that may refer to a word doc or excel sheet etc you can do two things: have a shortcut icon next to you notes for quick access to the doc or you can go to the doc and click print selecting OneNote in which the document will get printed into a page of your choice in which you can then make notes around it etc.... u no univeristy stuff lol.

- you can also share your OneNote notebook or how ever many you have which is good when doing group work with others so you can both edit the notebook as a group or to share ideas... its also good when showing lecturers your ideas etc..


these are some of the main things i use OneNote for which i find helpful at University.

 

Once we optimized the Envy, we should be able to get higher scores than that.
Hell, a M11x with a SU4100 got 1600, and a I5 is better than the 4100 and 5650 is a tiny bit better than the 335.

 

You need a minimum of 50,000 posts to see the answer.

Spoiler

What did I say? Didn't I say 50,000 posts?! You're hard headed! I ought to send you back to school!

1. Bill me later requires credit approval. If you have good credit, you'll be approved. Figure FICO of 680+

2. LOL. Names are going in a virtual/proverbial bowl. I lick some of the virtual papers with names written on them so they will stick to the sides of the virtual bowl.