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

LOL! Yes...that is MY Envy, lovingly lighted and backlit - they don't have a good shot that shows the wonderful design on the back while showing the front IMO, so I thought I'd shoot one. And no, I'm no pro, just an enthusiast, but thanks

Must.boot.it.up!! Grrr...to much stuff going on today!

 

The imagine is taken, then the background edited out can take maybe 10-30 minutes or less since it isn't a very complex figure.
If I am not mistaken the reflection on the bottom is real, or at least a well executed effect (Photoshop has something like it).

The back reflection though is a nice touch but IMO perhaps blurring it out as a distant reflection would have been better as it is too sharp compared to the rest of the picture (the actual laptop looks more blurry then the back).
A few minor issues here and there with too much blurring on the actual laptop, and odd touches of contrast and darkening around.

 

Wow....remind me to have you in my critiquing group LOL! I took that pic in like 5 minutes setup time and spent about 5 minutes on it on Photoshop because, well, I don't have time to do anything else. Nothing was really tweaked in PS except for a curves adjustment for the black background - I used a mirror for the back and smoked glass for the reflection in the front. The keyboard is blurry because I don't have a second off camera flash and no time to set up my studio strobes so I had to use a crappy CL softbox ;P

 

I think I remember reading a ways back that someone couldn't get DVD+R to work, but DVD-R did. And ditto on the DVD-RW not working

 

It looks NICE peaches! That's mad talent you got there and it looks like it required some time.

 

Not bad, not bad. It would take me about the same time albeit I think I would of done a way different style.

I wasn't sure if the blurring was due to the lack of light since it looked like you messed with the contrasts near the edges of the laptop.

 

Ok, I have her fired up and so far, I'm super pleased!

Cosmetically: No bad pixels (yay!), and with the exception of the slightly raised on the back left corner touchpad and slight rub marks on each hinge (which is going to happen anyway), I see absolutely nothing else wrong with this machine. It truly is a beautiful laptop. I'm a swirly kinda girl, so of course as soon as I saw the case - I had to have it. Nice that it came loaded with everything else eh?

Functionality: Well, they messed up with the right side of the system didn't they? We all know it, but it bares repeating. The power cord is sooo in the wrong location. I know, I know - the fan is on the left - but so what! The fan should be blowing out the back and the power cord should be on the left. Those USB ports on the right are nonsense as well. If you want to mouse ergonomically and have anything plugged in....good luck! This isn't a biggy to me - I'm a lefty and I'm going to throw a Wacom Bamboo tablet on the left anyway...but I know I'm not in the majority here.
As for the touchpad, I'm having zero issues with it. It is functioning as I would expect it to. I haven't tried doing any of the "Mac" tricks with it yet, but we'll see.
As for the 3D, while I didn't purchase this laptop for the 3D - it actually is pretty cool! I had to spend 20 minutes passing the 3D glasses around to the teenagers so they could watch the demos LOL! And I quickly figured out that I could view my photography in 3D...which is awesome!!! Will have a go at a 3D movie hopefully tonight or over the weekend, but suspect it will be very nice.
The sound on this baby is awesome as well! I have been dealing with an old Dell Inspiron and you just can't boost the sound up loud enough in bed when streaming stuff to make it not annoying. I can tell this will not be an issue with this laptop. It is going to fit the bill for watching movies and streaming Netflix and Amazon VOD while being tucked in bed I am wanting to try the wireless video - but may have to wait on shelling the $160 out for the box once hubby sees the price tag I paid for this baby!

Hardware: Everything seems to be in order. I have downloaded Hwinfo32 and am watching everthing. All cores seem to be running nicely and the temps are staying in the 50s. Contemplating a CPU burnin program but the one Cam121 listed is four years old...can anyone give me one to use that is more recent? I just want to stress it early on to make sure I don't have a throttling issue like two others here.
Will have to run the calibration on the monitor as I can see the colors are a bit off, too blue and very noticable when viewing pics in 3D especially.
Wireless is working fine....another SHEW!!!!

I am getting ready to put Acronis on and burn an image so I can install CS5 and a few other programs. That's it for now, will try to come back and update as I test more things.

 

Quite a day. My Envy arrived at last in peaches07 (your photographs are wonderful) picture perfect condition. No gaps, scratches, smudges, bad pixels, excessive heat, stripes - it is love at first sight. Now to figure him out. And thanks to you I am well equipped with lots of good information.

 

Good to hear that you have everything in order. Would you mind sharing the ICC profile if you do have calibration tool, seems to be no one has done it yet in this forum.

 

Hey KJ do you mind posting a picture of this gap that some people are reporting on? I'm having a hard time visualizing where on the laptop this is and if it will matter to me too much.

Like you I'm really not going to settle for anything that is less that near perfect. If its a mark and I can see it in my face while sitting down normally to use it I'm returning it immediately.

EDIT: More SSDs announced....SATA III correct?

Crucial releases m4 SSDs, prices them between $130 and $1,000 -- Engadget

 

Mmmmhmmm...notated from Fivers post to use CalPC to calibrate (I have never needed to do this before) - didn't realize it is a $400 program - either your fingers are sticky or your pockets are deep Fiver! Can anyone recommend a reliable free tool to use for this? My eyes will thank you in advance

 

Second on that. Additionally, what do you use to color calibrate your monitor? I do a little photography for fun (nothing like Peaches' work tho ) and would like to have the screen calibrated if possible

 

just got my envy. its one damn nice laptop. a little heavy but i don't mind. i'm in the process of making the recovery disks. then gotta clean all the junk HP put on like fence and stardock. and looks like hp didn't raid 0 my drives.

 

glad that all is well with urs....i just can see how the power cord being on the right side is an issue for anyone....does not make sense to me....but oh well....enjoy ur beast!! (~.^)

 

Without a spectrometer you are basically just eyeballing it and going to get it wrong.

Cheapest option I think is to use a Spyder3 Express which comes with bundled software however it is not as flexible or powerful as CalMan. There are plans on the internet to build your own spectrometer I've read about and maybe you could find some free software but I don't know anything about that.

The Spyder3 spectrometer also does poorly reading low luma output so your greyscale at the 30 and below range may still be a bit off it's kind of a crapshoot. Honestly the Spyder3 worked fine for me but the X2 is NIST traceable so while it isn't the most perfect device it's more than adequate for anybody that's not working in a production setting.

 

On my E14, calibration show the radiance screen potential. Someone in NBR E14 have the calibration tool and software, I get lucky that he share the profile. Yes indeed. It is expensive piece of set, you will be AMAZED on how your screen looks after the calibration.

Someone must know someone who works in printing, photography who can help us get this E17 SB 3D screen calibrated.

 

Sure, perhaps tomorrow. Digi camera in office.

KJ

 

My envy arrived in great condition with no noticeable gaps or scuff marks. Now if anyone could point me to a guide to back up Windows 7 it would be greatly appreciated!

 

Well if you really want here's my profile but the point of the exercise is to calibrate my specific display, not some other random Envy display so I have no idea how it will work on anyone else's display, if they could make them perfect and identical from the factory no one would ever need to buy a coloromiter.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/fiver/temp-share/Generic+PnP+Monitor_1_Standard+Profile.icm

 

Good gravy...I'm gonna have to eyeball it as I'm not spending bank on one of those!!!! I'd rather put that money into some good glass for my camera I've already gone in and tweaked it more to the green side with the hue setting and you could take the satch down a bit as well. That screen is crazy with the colors!! It'd be nice if they had an autocalibrator built in LOL!!

I'm imaging right now, but I ran into a big "uh oh" right before I started - and that was to notice that neither of my USBs work on the right hand side, and the mem card reader doesn't work either. I suspect someone didn't plug in a cable as I get no power at all - but the USB on the left works just fine. Not sure if I should venture into opening the case or not, not sure how things are situated or if there is no cable for that, just hardwired onto the mobo. :sigh: was hoping I wasn't going to have to get the in home repair guy coming out and marring the crap out of my system case so soon.....

Here is an alternate view with the lights turned off. This is the first backlit keyboard I've had...I think I'm going to like it

 

hmmm. I'm about a week into my envy experience and I had my first random freeze a minute ago. All I was doing was scrolling through the forum. Hopefully it was a fluke. Glad to hear another round of Envys shows up for those that had been waiting longer than I care to remember.

 

I found the part of this thread that spoke of wireless causing freezing and made the changes but I'm still experiencing freezing after waking up from sleep and the BluRay drive seems to be intermittently causing freezes as well. maybe others who have experienced freezing and found fixes can share? I tried the search function and can't seem to get that to work either. Maybe I should have bought the Dell i tried to buy but told them to pound sand when they would not honor a $70 discount and the issues was central time vs. pacific time and coupon expiration. LOL first post on forum=rant

 

Prime95 is perhaps the best tool. Run it using In-Place Large FFTs option.
Use CPU-Z or Intel Turbo Boost Monitor to figure out if it's throttling.
It should remain above or at rated speed (2.0 Ghz for the I7 2630QM or 2.3 GHZ for the I7 2820Q)

 

COOL! I'll test the ICC this weekend. I am aware that all screen is not the same, but on the same model...they do tend to have similar/close parameter.

For those who were complaining about the USB,etc. being on the right side...here how I set my E14, maybe could be an inspiration for the rest.

 

So the Catalyst 11.4 drivers are out. Any tricks on how to be able to install them on this piece of s"@t laptop?

 

Bobmitch, thanks for the insight on CAS value, I would not have known that was a major factor. I will search high and low for 8 or lower.

I finally received my laptop, and NO DEFECTS...woohoo!!

 

You might want to ask HP about that one. CAS 8 or lower is great, BUT...if your machine defaults at CAS9, you just wasted your money. Remember that DDR3 1600 memory will give you overhead for overclocking...something the Envy is not capable of. Now with that said, ask an HP tech if the board uses XMP settings on memory. If YES...then the board will recognize CAS 8 or lower. If not...keep the 1333 ram.

 

I used DVD+R to create my first set on my old Envy and they worked fine. I used DVD-R on my second envy and it worked fine. To each his own.

While Prime95 will help stress your CPU, the best stress test came from Core Damage. Honestly, I have all four programs on my laptop (Prime95, IntelBurnTest, LinX, and Core Damage) and only Core Damage can push my CPU cores into the 90C temp range.

P.S. Core Damage is only ~2 years old but it works great for its intended purpose.

 

First I cleaned the AMD drivers using Driver Sweeper, restarted, CCleaner, installed Intel drivers from their site, restarted, installed 11.4. I thought everything was good until I switched to the Intel graphics and the screen went black on me...everything but the display was functioning so I was blind. I restarted and the display was back (to my surprise, see below) but the brightness was turned all the way down and could not be changed.

So then I used Driver Sweeper again on the AMD drivers, restarted, uninstalled Intel drivers, restarted, CCleaner, installed 11.4 drivers again while leaving Intel drivers at factory defaults. Not even going to try to use switchable graphics now...

This has happened before when trying to install 11.3 and 11.4 preview drivers where the screen would stay black after switching to Intel drivers and would stay that way after rebooting. Had to go into safe mode and run a system restore.

I really hope there will be a BIOS update that completely disables switchable graphics since HP rarely updates graphic drivers. The release notes for the 11.4 Mobility drivers state that they are not compatible with notebooks with switchable graphics. There are workarounds but I'm getting sick of it having to take multiple installations to get it "right."

Oh, and the only time I could ever get the brightness keys to work were with factory drivers.

 

Thanks I just found a version that worked. I'm sorry for my outburst, but I'm just so tired of every little easy thing being hard on this notebook. I wonder why they made it like this.

 

Blame AMD for this. Nvidia is very open with their driver updates. They supply updates for M series chips with every driver release. HP used to use Nvidia GPU...but not in the past few years.

 

Here is a challenge for someone who runs on battery alot! If you were to turn off switchable graphics and let the machine run off battery with the 6850, what impact does it have on your 6 cell and 9 cell battery time?

 

I replied to your post before I read the rest of the posts that explained the CAS issues. I ordered my laptop with 6 gigs since I was planning on ordering the 1600 memory, so even if I will not get the gains I thought I would, I still have to buy the memory to get the 8Gig.

Atleast I will get a performance increase when I swap out the 5400 for an ssd. Now all I have to do is filter back through this forum to figure out the dos and donts before swapping drives.

 

That's great news!

 

BTW, will be receiving the Intel Centrino Ultimate N 6300, this week. I am going to put it in to see if it will stop all of these freezes, about 1 freeze per hour. I will keep you posted.

 

Which version?

 

http://www2.ati.com/DRIVERS/mobile/11-4_mobility_vista_win7_64_dd_ccc_ocl.exe

These

 

has the Envy 17 SATA III or only SATA II Ports?

i want to buy a SSD Vertex 3 or Crusial C400

 

Ah OK. I checked the website but the only thing I found was the preview release that had been out for a few weeks.

It installed for me right on top of the stock HP drivers with no problems. I'm not going to run this full time but it's nice to have for the madvr bug reports I've been filing.

Now if we could just find away to hack back in the ACPI functionality...

 

They actually are the first drivers I couldn't install. I used driver sweeper to clean out the HP drivers. Then installed these...and blue screened because of the Intel GPU. So driver sweeper again...installed the HP and then 11.4 over the HP. Lost the ability to switch GPU's and lost CCC. Back to the HP drivers

 

Here is an extremely quick and dirty fix to get brightness hotkeys with broken drivers... Normally I wouldn't throw something this incomplete out there, but I might be a bit busy the next few days so whoever wants to play with it can.

You could do this with only two hotkeys if you took the time to do a proper loop to find your current brightness level and then increment or decrement as appropriate. I sort of like having a direct key to get to any absolute screen brightness though I guess.

This doesn't seem to work with applications that completely hijack your keyboard like most games, etc. Maybe you could get it working if you futzed with the hotkey choices or dug into the AHK options, no idea about that right now I don't have time to look into it. Obviously if you have an application running that used these same hotkeys that would be a problem too, easy enough to change to some other keys though.

Surprisingly it does seem to work fine with the apps I tested in DirectX exclusive mode that aren't in the process of hijacking your keyboard.

Get the DisplayBrightness console app from here Display Brightness Vista Gadget // projects.edgylogic

Might as well grab the gadget too it's pretty nifty, just be aware that it won't refresh it's brightness value display if the brightness is changed in any manner other than through the gadget. No big whoop.

Install AutoHotKey.

Save the below ahk script, fix the path, and run it. ctl-alt+NUMBER will set your display brightness to whatever number you pressed i.e. 5=50%. Tilde is 0.

Like I said quick and dirty, tweak at will if you read the docs there is plenty of places to go from here.

================================
^!`::Run "C:\Users\Fiver\Downloads\DisplayBrightnessConsole\DisplayBrightnessConsole.exe" 0
^!1::Run "C:\Users\Fiver\Downloads\DisplayBrightnessConsole\DisplayBrightnessConsole.exe" 10
^!2::Run "C:\Users\Fiver\Downloads\DisplayBrightnessConsole\DisplayBrightnessConsole.exe" 20
^!3::Run "C:\Users\Fiver\Downloads\DisplayBrightnessConsole\DisplayBrightnessConsole.exe" 30
^!4::Run "C:\Users\Fiver\Downloads\DisplayBrightnessConsole\DisplayBrightnessConsole.exe" 40
^!5::Run "C:\Users\Fiver\Downloads\DisplayBrightnessConsole\DisplayBrightnessConsole.exe" 50
^!6::Run "C:\Users\Fiver\Downloads\DisplayBrightnessConsole\DisplayBrightnessConsole.exe" 60
^!7::Run "C:\Users\Fiver\Downloads\DisplayBrightnessConsole\DisplayBrightnessConsole.exe" 70
^!8::Run "C:\Users\Fiver\Downloads\DisplayBrightnessConsole\DisplayBrightnessConsole.exe" 80
^!9::Run "C:\Users\Fiver\Downloads\DisplayBrightnessConsole\DisplayBrightnessConsole.exe" 90
^!0::Run "C:\Users\Fiver\Downloads\DisplayBrightnessConsole\DisplayBrightnessConsole.exe" 100

 

Hi Guys,

These questions remain unanswered until now. Can anybody answer that? I will receive the 2D version today (1st one was defective) and I am unsure if I should switch to the 3D version. More brightness would be appreciated when using a glare display if it does not affect battery life (on same brightness) if I am far from a power connector ;-)

Yes, some guys will use that thing still as a portable device (too)

 

The 3D screen is said to be a much higher quality screen than the 2D. Higher color gamut (meaning it shows more real colors), higher brightness, and higher contrast.

Because it is brighter it will probably use a little bit more battery than the 2D screen, but probably nothing too significant.

 

So, fiver5, are your integrated graphics and switching still enabled?

 

And of course you can always just turn the screen brightness down a little and then I really can't see it making much difference in power consumption with the 2D version.

The big deciding factor for me was that while the 2d version LOOKS cheaper than the 3D version, it really isnt. Go on HP's website and construct one 2d envy and one 3d envy, with the same options. Yes the 2d starts cheaper, but once you put the same CPU and options on it that the 3d comes with standard, you'll find that actually there is basically no difference in the price (plus the 3d is coming with one pair of glasses worth $100, and the better screen). So the 3d is really just a better value if you ask me.

 

I've hoped so much for this answer I read that before but all information I could find was only related to the earlier Version of the Envy 17 and I did not know if that changed. THANK YOU!

Here in Germany there is a huge price gap between 2D and 3D version and we cannot configure the notebook freely. That's why I ordered the 2D version first and after receiving it with a defective body I decided to upgrade to the 3D version. Now I can't wait to get it and I still must order the second drive bay (from the US) because no version with 2 HDDs is released here but at the same time I can order the ebay 9cell battery which seems to work well. The HP 9 cell bettery costs A LOT but has 3 years warranty here...

That was also important for me. If you set them to the same senseable brightness, the 3D display should not consume significantly more power because I will need battery life (at least sometimes)

 

About the 3D Glasses:

A few people have said that they probably will never use them and just got the 3D version for the better screen and because the price was the same. One person even said they might play with the glasses some and then throw them away.

If you aren't going to use your glasses and might throw them away or just let them get dusty in a drawer somewhere, please let me know and I might be interested in taking them off your hands. Send me a PM and we can talk about it. THANKS!

marcus

 

+1, I'll need another one. If you guys do not play games, stick with HP driver. I have lots of issue installing ATI newest driver to a point I stop trying and stick with HP driver.

 

But what exactly is the problem? Is it that the whole "Switchable Graphics" feature is destroyed when you install the latest Catalyst drivers?

Is it more than that?

Cuz I plan on doing a clean install since it seems like coolsense isn't doing much.

But I would like to be able to use the hot keys and/or any touch sensitive buttons the Envy 17 has....

 

As I said before...the issue isn't as much HP as AMD. Seems that no matter what kind of laptop you have...Neither HP, Dell, Asus, nor anyone updates video drivers during the lifetime of the product. When you get Nvidia GPU, you get updates everytime the drivers are updated, and they just install. Problem right now is the Nvidia GPU 500 series are weak and really not worth buying. The 550 or 555 are below standard fermi cards. The 460M is older, and more powerful. HP hasn't used Nvidia GPU's in a very long time, and frankly this whole switchable graphics thing is the issue. Once you uninstall the AMD drivers...drivers for the Intel GPU are gone as well. I removed the drivers before installing 11.4 and when I rebooted...I bluescreened. Seems that the conflict wasn't AMD chip, but Intel. I am contemplating throwing the whole switchable graphics thing out the window. I might try disabling the Intel GPU altogether and try reinstalling 11.4 (big issue with these drivers is CCC has changed). Might try later...

I really dont use the brightness hotkey all that much. I do use the hotkey for sound volume and some of the others as well. I set brightness in the Power applet in CP and usually rarely adjust it