*HP ENVY 17 & 17 3D (2XXX series) Owners Lounge*

I tried that, it didn't lock up the 30mins I had it connected atleast.

I wish I had the patience, but I don't
Especially since I'm pretty sure it's a wireless conflict by now, and everything else about this computer is working absolutely flawlessly.
Also, still no freezes after wifi driver rollback to previous version. Connected in N mode to the router. Gonna eventually test what Bobmitch said, by updating to newest driver again and turning off N on the router, but I'll give it some more time to lock up again

 

If the hold works for you, let me know. They told me they can't do it. My plan is to try to find out who has my tour and literally stop the driver before he leaves FedEx.

EDIT: so my envy finally left Memphis at 3pm local time. After getting there at 1am. Just sitting around for 14 hours. Now I am worried they won't even make Thursday. Google maps gives me 1 day and 8 hours for driving (and I am sure the FedEx truck won't just drive straight through without stopping).
I have a presentation at a clients on Sunday, and I was hoping to take my new envy rather than my old crappy Samsung... Oh well, as long as it get's here without flaws, I'll be happy. Don't really ahve time to messwith it that much. But at least thanks to a couplemof good guys ion here, we might have all the flaws identified and have some solutions for it.

 

I have received my Envy 17 3D yesterday. Wanted to change the primary HDD 1 To 5200RPM to 750GB 7200RPM. My question is, can I keep the 1 To HDD as a 2nd drive without wipe it off. Will the OS inside will creat conflict with the 1st HDD which I planned to install? Since this is the factory HDD from HP, would prefer to keep it as it is. Logically I would think not possible, but just wanted to be sure before I buy a 2nd HDD. Will someone be kind and answer my question. Thanks

 

Disregard my Hard Drive Test...glad you got it fixed...darn wifi...wonder if its gonna be a problem with all of ours...ugh.

KJ

 

Were yours generally slow Killa Joe? I was thinking about the hard drive test, but I don't have 1.5 hours right now... Just wanna play with my Envy

 

Good thinking!!! In case they even hesitate, I will explain I need the credit to buy a Windows 7 install disk.

KJ

 

Laptop stuck in Alaska for 2 or 3 days. Starting to think my Envy is not gonna reach its estimated date of 4/13.

I was tryna see if they can hold my Envy at the Fedex office near me and it said This shipment cannot be held. Which sucks cause I do not want to miss a day of school.

 

I just received my ENVY and it has this weird small noise coming out from the Blueray drive every 30 second or so. It is quite annoying. Do u guys have the same issue? How could I fix it?

 

scrap my other post. Guess FedEx is the same as HP. It really depends who you get as a rep on the other side of teh line.
This morning they told me that they can't hold the notebook at the location due to some stupid shipping regulatins by the shipper (hp). And the funny thing is, they also told me it would be trucked.
I just called again, and she told me they will hold it at the FedEx location next to my office and it will be available for pick up by 9:00 a.m. tomorrow morning!!!!
Can I ask fedEx if they give me a credit on HP

Call them. See above.

 

That would be wishful thinking that it comes early!

 

Is this confirmed? What product demo are you referring too? I was not aware the envy supported this. I ordered prior to this showing up in the specs. Interesting....

 

I bought the 4yr extended and accidental damage; have it sitting next to me waiting for a computer....

 

Slow you say? LMFAO! Heck yeah. It was slower than my dv7-4283cl which I'm still using now. The dv7 has only a 5400rpm HDD where as the Envy 17 3D SB had the 7200rpm, and the darn dv7 booted up to the desktop way, way faster than my Envy!!! Then Envy still had the stupid turning circle as it were working/thinking...sheesh. So yeah, bad MOBO.

KJ

 

Ok, latest update on the wireless issue. Ran for hours on the old wifi driver, and no freezes (but got some random connection losses that lasted for 4-5 seconds)

Updated back to the newest driver (14.0.2.2) and it froze after 2 minutes.
Now I have disabled N mode on my router, and are waiting to see if it will freeze. Crappy wireless card, couldn't they have put something better in there?

 

I asked about that noise before sending mine back. It turns out to be normal according to the knowledgeable members of NBR. Again, at least UPON BOOTUP it is normal....not sure why after you press the power every 30 seconds you still get that sound.....

KJ

 

The one on the product description. That's been confirmed long ago.

 

So then all of the 2nd generation Envy 17 3D's SB models have WiDi?

 

Newest driver plus B/G mode was failure, lasted 5min until freeze. Rolled back again as it seems to be the only way.

 

Good to know....what does "MTBF" mean though?

I"m think I'm gonna go with Intel or Crucial...

Can someone elaborate though on how the Read/Write speeds are important when it comes to performance of the laptop. Is it more for burning CDs/DVDs, or doing movie editing? What about if one has a USB 3.0 external hard drive? Does it impact the performance of that?

 

At least now we know it seems to be a driver issue. I know it is probably annoying to loose connection for a couple seconds once in a while, but it's good to know that for know we know how to deal with it. Thanks Apoxx for all the testing.
Hopefully we will some new drivers soon that will take care of this issue.
I'll be testing mine on different routers once I receive it. Maybe it is some compatible issue as well. I actually had to roll back a driver form my neighbors Dell as well, since he was locked out of my wifi port after he updated.

 

"
04/12/2011 05:50:31PM John: "Did the Envy 17 3d latop have WiDi support before 4-10-2011, or was it a new addition. The configuration didn't use to list it, but now it does"
04/12/2011 05:56:48PM Agent (Charisse R.): "By that date, it has already the WiDi support."
04/12/2011 05:57:11PM John: "cool, can you tell me when WiDi support first came on board?"
04/12/2011 05:58:17PM Agent (Charisse R.): "The WiDi support came in last year."
04/12/2011 05:58:51PM John: "okay, thank you"
04/12/2011 05:59:08PM Agent (Charisse R.): "I hope this information has been of assistance to you."

 

Which old driver? Last night I was trying one directly from Intel (13.5 I think) and was still having issues.

I got cranky and impatient about the issue and ordered a 6300 at like 2AM

I'll still probably drop it in but if THAT is broken too it's nice to know there is some driver working with the 6200.

 

If you use your ssd as a system drive only, for w7 and programs, the write speed does not matter. If you actually use it for a page file or to save your files when compresssing movies, write speed is rather important.
Vertex 3 is in stock at TigerDirect now. Only the 120 GB though (just a bit too small for me). And if you have a visa signature card, you get $10 off (not much but better than nothing).
I am leaning towards the intel 510, but I really don't feel like dishing out $600 (that's almost half of what I paid for the Envy).

 

HP support sure has had a less than stellar track record about getting out accurate information.

 

Nice, I'd be interested in seeing that atleast. I find it weird though that a router can force your pc to freeze. I'm considering a new router, but I'm also afraid to waste money should the problem remain after upgrading.

Do anyone know btw if you can actually remove the wifi card and/or switch it out yourself, or if that would be too much work (with soldering and stuff)?

 

Pull drive bay cover.

Pull memory bay cover.

Remove two antenna clips

Remove two screws in pci-e card.

Remove card

Installation is reverse of disassembly.

 

Cool, do you know any other wifi card that fits incase I want another model?

 

I called HP (Resolutions) about the RAID0 issue and they gave me a $100 credit to avoid the RMA.

MTBF= Mean Time Between Failure - ie. the average amount of time until a device is expected to experience a critical failure.

I'm going with either the Crucial c300 (if I do a Gen3) or the same Intel X25M (gen2). The way I look at it, I can do one of two things:

- Install the Crucial and get a new Envy with a Gen 3 SSD for $100 less than what I currently paid.

OR​

- I can install the Intel and have a new Envy with a Gen2 SSD for $300 less than what I currently paid.​

 

Basically any pci-e wifi card should be good to go, from a hardware perspective.

One problem is that certain (maybe all?) models of HP have whitelisted pci-e compoenents in the BIOS. If you plug in something the BIOS doesn't approve of it won't initialize.

On other models there are people putting out hacked BIOS to get around the issue. As of yet I don't believe there are any hacked BIOS for the new Envy, nor would I expect there to be given it's age and the fact that nobody has discovered yet if this whitelist policy is in effect.

I have some junk Atheros card I can drop in later tonight to see what happens (my drive and memory bay covers are still held on with painters tape lol). It also seems due to my anger I'm going to be a guinea pig for the Intel 6300 so we'll just see what happens lol.

 

http://downloadmirror.intel.com/19513/eng/ICS_Ds64.exe
Try this one. When you install it, it will show up as 13.4.0.9 and so far it's the only one that hasn't given me a single crash. (I've tried all of their drivers so far, including HP's newest one, and all end up crashing, some quicker than others)

Edit: If not, tell me how the 6300 turns out

 

There was a time where I was ripping Bluray movies that I owned and compressing it to a friendlier format so I could play those movies on my iPhone 4.

And it worked but my HDX 18t could barely complete the task. Talk about overheating...I'm hoping the Envy 17 3D can accomplish this type of task easily without experience too much stress if provided the right processor (2820QM) and 8GB of RAM.

But you're saying an SSD will also help in this regard too right?

EDIT: SO is Apoxxx the only one having the wifi issues? Or are other current owners having the same problems?

And I'm gonna do a clean install I think and just download all the drivers. My only concern though is how do I get the integral software from HP in that swsetup folder but NOT the bloatware? Does the swsetup folder contain only the essentials or is basically just getting the same crap that originally came with the laptop?

I only ask cuz when I did a clean install on my HDX all the essential drivers (display, wireless, etc) were all available thru Windows Update and I had no troubles. Only a few did I get straight from the internet thru HP's own website or the original company....I'm hoping the same can happen in this situation.

 

Quick question since you seem to know about the wireless cards: Will it matter the Intel 6300 has 3 antenna ports while the Envy itself only has 2 antenna leads.

 

Upgrading my router won't help me much at home. I am using t-mobile @home for $5 flatrate phone call. and it only works with one specific linksys router, since they actually put a sim card in it to initate the phone.
>>>total side note, but this is actually the sheapest way for a home line. Funny, every single time ATT or Time Warner try to sell me their package with VoiP flatrate phone calls, I only have to tell them "I have T-Mobile @home" and they shut up. One rep actually said "yeahh, I wish I could have it".<<<< side note end.

 

Yes it will help quite a bit from what i heard and read, since the dirive is the bottle neck for these applications. (sorry, no first hand experience)
One thing to be aware of though. Doing a lot of writes on the ssd will eventually shorten their lifespan. TRIM is supposed to make everything better, but still, don't expect the drive to last 5 years if you constantly write on it.

 

Well I got my Envy 17 SB today. Fedex had estimated Delivery time of the 13th. However it was attempted delivery today, so I picked it up from the Fedex office.
So far so good. The 1TB 5200 RPM is surprisingly snappy for the RPM, then again something tells me this is a 2x 500GB platter hard drive, so it's bound to be snappy due to the technological leap in platter density.

Temperatures are very good. At around 46c~ idle on the i7 2360QM with the Intel Graphics instead of the dedicated GPU.

 

cam121, excellent. That sounds about right, and fair. I will be doing that when mine is here. If they honor that credit, I would have saved alot.

KJ

 

I was about to write that it crashed again, so I really don't have much choice other than to return it, which is the last thing in the world I want right now. But then it crashed again and I had to rewrite it, damn it's annoying. Definitely my last HP laptop, starting to regret I didn't go Alienware after all.
Last try: Gonna try the oldest driver I can come by, and leave the computer downloading over the night... If it's frozen in the morning, it's going back.

Oh, and if this works, atleast it will get me by until I can replace the 6200 intel piece of trash. If it can't be replaced, then I'll call hp and ask ?

 

Apoxxx, as a last ditch effort would you mind calling Envy tech support and see what they think after running various tests with you? You have been such a big part of our community, and would hate to lose your insights into laptops and other matters tech or not. Maybe there is a slight chance Envy tech can directly spot the reason for your issues. It can't hurt, and maybe HP will offer you some discount for an exchange? IDK, maybe I'm grasping at straws....but it was worth a try. Hope it does work out for you one way or the other.

KJ

 

My experience with tech supports is that they don't know anything about computers at all, so I have my doubts HP will be able to help me.

 

I'm not sure about the conflict issue, but my IT guy at work recommended that I keep the old HDD safely stored just in case there's a problem when I install the SSD that I ordered. He suggested that, if I wanted a secondary HDD drive, I spend the extra $$ to get a new one and install it when I install the SSD. That seems like good advice if for no other reason than keeping the old HDD safely stored allows you to roll back if the new drive gives you problems.

 

Didn't even last 10 minutes.... I think I got a bad computer, it can't be anything else. Premium my @@@ss

 

card is Atheros AR5B97.

I feel so safe.

 

It works?

By the way, could any of you guys try the intel turbo boost driver? It doesn't wanna install for me, says unsupported hardware.
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp49501-50000/sp49536.exe

Edit: Didn't see the picture at first, guess not

 

According to the product literature I read last night the 6300 is a 3x3 card but can support any number of antennas. I'm assuming to get three spacial streams you'd need all three antennas, at least that seems to make sense to me while I sit here and think about it.

If you want to get fancy I think you could fish a 3rd antenna around in there somewhere.

 

Apoxxx, I realize you are frustrated, but perhaps at least wait until tomorrow evening or Thursday at least to make a final decision. I am just thking more people will be getting theirs in a day or two, so you will have so many others to compare your Envy to. If its widespread it could be some crazy fix HP needs to do...if not, well, you'll know yours is just a lemon. I do hope its the former.

I am sure you are more than aware of the HP 21 day retun policy. So unless you are in a hurry to return it (maybe you need the money back to get that Alienware), I'd hope you stretch the returning of your laptop a while longer to make sure its really the system you have. I'd hate for you to kick yourself after doing and RMA and finding its a simple fix....maybe..

KJ

 

Another freeze... I've passed 20 crashes today, easily. What wireless router do you have fiver5? I'm starting to doubt it has anything to do with this though, and that our wifi cards (and/or other hardware) are just broken.

 

My wireless router is a Linksys 610n v2 with DD-WRT 15692

Putting the 2.4 channel of the router in G only mode, disabling N on the 6200 and putting the 6200 in G only mode actually gets me stability.

 

HP Notebooks Battery Life

Any idea why the regular envy has better battery life than the 3d? is it the i5 vs. the i7 or the 120hz screen? I am trying to figure out where I will be at for battery life on my e17 3d 6cell when I get it.

 

All of the above. The i7 pulls more power than he i5 and the 3D screen has a higher contrast ratio and is brighter (more power).

 

Apoxxx have you tried doing what you need to do without the wireless and hard wire your envy to the router?

I'd give that a go and see if you can accomplish what you need to do. You may just have a bad card in your computer... You know it's made in China!