*HP Envy 15 (11XX / 12XX series) Owners Lounge!*

I have the problem too and there are 2 threads in the HP forums on here which describe the problem. It's extremely annoying, kinda surprising it affects a number of envy owners on these forums.

 

Hey does anyone think HP's gonna release an update for the Synaptics drivers for the 15 so the touchpad performance would be similar to the new Envys'? They did that for the 1st gens, right? Got fed up of waiting for Gen 3 and finally jumped on the 2nd gen

 

when people get their hands on the envy 17, they should be able to get the drivers from em and upload it for us

 

The 17 ships with an older version of the touchpad driver than most of us are currently using, check out the Envy 15 drivers thread which has the most current drivers for most devices.

Also you need to make sure the device ID of your touchpad matches the device ID the driver is for or you may run into issues...

@scishock

All the envy 17 drivers are already available from the HP support website, no need to upload anything....

 

Thanks! Is the touchpad fairly workable with the new drivers?

 

The touchpad is very good with even the original drivers. The newer ones can make it very close to the Apple models, the main thing is you need to do is spend some time tweaking things to your liking, the settings out of the box are terrible.

 

Ok cool, I'm probably going to have to tweak it with scrybe right?
Thanks a lot, by the way

 

I wish they come up with an option to export settings to a file this way we dont have to reconfigure the settings"one more time"

 

I'd be very wary about trying to run an 820QM with a 90W adapter. Sounds like a good way to burn out a power supply or the board.

The Kensington 120W power supplies work well with the Envy. If you're just upset about the size of the adapter, it is much smaller. The adapter plus the cables is as big as the brick of the original 120W supply, and the whole thing is much lighter.

 

I got a frustrating issue. You know how all the F keys are mapped to volume/brightness/etc.. well, they're always active. I need to press the FN key to actually use F5 to refresh a page.

Is there any way to disable this behavior? I want to be able to use the F keys, and then FN-F# to adjust volume/brightness.

Any ideas?

 

@drecca

You can change that setting in the bios

 

Well, HP sent me a free second brick to make up for some headaches so I will just make do. Only reason I was considering the slim was I thought it would be lighter to carry but for the time being I don't have to lug it to and from school so will just put up with the brick in my bag for the times I do. Who knows, maybe by fall they will come out with an improved battery so the darn brick will be needed even less <crosses fingers>

 

Envy 15 said to be suffering from blank screen issues, lousy webcam -- Engadget

sounds like the fire has been lit under hp's kettle. the compaints thread on the HP forum has about 20 pages now...


My webcam does the purple thing too but I never had any of these white screens of death, so I guess I feel lucky, but I am also terrified at the possibility of my Envy STARTING to do it...

 

I got this Kensington 90W brick. The i5-540 in my Envy throttles unless I'm using throttlestop. It is really small though, so I'm ok with that (and much thanks to the throttlestop programmer)

I made a post a few hundred pages back about the power requirements of the laptop and found that the device will actually pull over 100W on the original brick at full CPU and GPU load while charging and the screen brightness is turned up. This indicates to me that even an i5-540 Envy should use a 120W adapter if this is a likely usage scenario. I'm amazed that it can run unthrottled without crashing on a 65W brick.

 

My purple screen thingy with the webcam was "fixed" by not allowing the system to auto adjust the white balance. Maybe it's supposed to do that with the IR camera? I dunno.

 

There are several 90W bricks that do not throttle the envy 15 i5's, including all the HP models. Your Kengsington must have either the wrong tip or it is not capable of sending the proper signal through the 'smart pin' to the computer. As far as the 65W slim adapter goes I can not only run it unthrottled (with ThrottleStop) but I can get consistant 10,000+ scores on 3Dmark06 and P6500+ scores with 3DmarkVantage. And even when running a 100% CPU stability test plus Furmark with the GPU running OC'd to 625/1125 the adapter barley gets above luke warm.

I also have an issue with your claim of seeing over 100W loads when you tested the power draw. You must be measuring the AC side of the power adapter, which has huge inefficiencies. There is no way HP could get UL / CSA approval for an adapter that is rated below the maximum power draw of the device it ships with. As an example even my 65W HP travel adapter has an AC input rating of 100V - 240V AC @ 1.5A max which equals 150W+ input, while the output rating is 65W maximum. Also keep in mind that there is a 'smart charging' circuit which will cut back the charging current to prevent the power draw from exceeding the maximum rating of the adapter that is in use (sensed through the center pin).

 

someone mentioned the fact that the camera picks up IR as purple and since sunlight and incandescent light have lots of IR, anything illuminated by them looks purple for the cam.
but that's still hard to excuse...if there's enough light, turn not just the LEDs off, but also IR frequency sensibility....

 

I apologize if this has been asked before, I've read back up to 40 pages and didn't find an answer (and 500+ pages is a lot to read).

If I purchase an Envy 15 with a single 320GB HDD (the cheapest option), will there still be an extra (empty) bay in there so that in the future I can add a 2nd HDD or SSD? Or do you have to select the 2-drive option in order to have the 2 drive bays?

 

The envy uses 2 x 1.8" drives for the dual drive options or 1 x 2.5" drive. AFAIK, the 320 HDD is a 2.5" drive, so no extra bay. I don't think you can configure an option that uses just a single 1.8" drive with an empty space to upgrade.... If you plan on getting SSD's I recommend ordering them from HP as they are still a very good value compared to buying your own and upgrading. Try pricing out the 1.8" 160GB intels yourself and you'll see what I mean...

 

The drive bay is for 1x 2.5" drive, plus you DON'T get the second sata connector if you order single 320 drive.

I learned this the hard way lol, would recommend getting the dual drive setup from the get-go. You can always sell the drives on eBay and put whatever you want in there. I really wish I had done that.

 

It's not a software thing. It's a hardware thing. You either have an IR filter over the lens, or you don't. If you have a night-capable cam, you can't have an IR filter, so the only thing you can do is try to balance the colors in "normal" lighting. That's VERY hard to do, because you're trying to take the invisible-turned-visible colors back out of the image, rather than the sensor never seeing them in the first place.

Technology isn't magic, people. It works on various proven, scientific principles. Sometimes there are tradeoffs that have to be made.

 

@ JJB and MrSneis: Thanks for your clear answers. I never knew SSD's came in a 1.8" size, only 2.5". Looking at aftermarket pricing in Newegg, it does seem the values you're getting from HP is much better.

 

For those of you with dual SSD, do you have problems with 4k read speed? I've just read about it on engadget and I was wondering if it's a chance you'll encounter this problem or if it is a sure thing.

I've just ordered my envy 15 with dual ssd and it should arrive monday =/

 

Heya everyone,

I've gone and read approximately 50 pages of this thread and I haven't been able to find the answers I am looking for, so pardon me for asking if this has already been asked.

I'm looking to purchase an HP Envy 15, but unfortunately I live in Canada, which means that hp.com will not ship to me (lamers!).

I noticed that there are a bunch of different model numbers for the HP Envy. If you order from the HP website, customizing it gives you a HP Envy 15-1150 model. The only one available at retail and on the HP Canada website is the 15-1050CA. The only difference I could tell from the specs is the that the 1150 has the mobility radeon 5830 vs the mobility radeon 4830. Are there any other differences that I'm missing? I do realize that the 5830 is alot better than the 4830 .

The lack of the updated graphics + known manufacturing issues with the camera and with the randomly turning off screen are really nagging on my decision .

 

Well the first gen ones also have massive heating issues and screen glitches...

 

Wow, I called about returning the Envy due to the noise and heat issues and they gave me an additional 10% off after I was given an RA number. So it got reduced even more. So final price was 870 (after taxes/fees) and they extended my return period by a week to see if I can live with the high pitched noise. That's great customer service.

 

Yeah, they offered me an extra $160 to keep my Envy b/c I wasn't sure I wanted it. Ended up getting my Limited Edition Envy 15 for under $1350. A steal considering its now base-priced at $1999....

 

The SSD's come in RAID0 from the factory and IIRC the 4k numbers are good. If you un-RAID them like I have done so you can use TRIM (and have redundant backup) then their is a known contoller issue that has reduced 4K R/W speeds. I get an average of 17MB/s read / 24MB/s write for 4K random speeds (all other speeds meet specs). While this is well below intels specified speeds, in real world use I notice no difference compared to the much faster (spec'd) RAID0 configuration, exampe; boot time is 14 sec. and full restart time is 29 sec. which is almost identical to the RAID0 times....

Bottom line, it's blazing fast either way

 

tradeoffs that people paying top dollar (for a laptop) should damn well be notified of, don't you think? how often do you videochat in pitch darkness without even having a lamp on?
is it really worth all this bad press?

on a side note, you don't need to tell this aerospace engineering student that tech isn't magic, but instead assume that not everyone knows how IR sensors work and that I was merely making an educated guess for the sake of argument. it's software? well, balancing the colors back to an ACCEPTABLE level is NOT hard and the program that automatically balances whites should have been given a bit more attention. The people at Adobe figured it out and then some so it's certainly within their grasp.

I mean seriously, how much money has HP wasted on returned Envys due to this?
they could have almost added a second, non IR webcam and advertised it for 3D videochatting while they were at it...

 

i ordered my envy with 350 coupon in April. It took me a 35 days to receive it, 10 days for production, 10 days in iceland dust or whatever it is, 15 days in Canadian customs, 5 days domestic shipping. but i can still say it is worth the hustle coz performance-wise it is way better than the one you can get in futureshop.

oh did i mention i paid 185 bucks for duty and custom?

 

Just to upset you, I ordered mine 9pm Tuesday and it was delivered 10am Thursday. And I picked the 5 - 7 business days free shipping.

Okay, so it was the quick ship model but still.

 

Good to know, thanks a lot. Looks like I'm going to have the same spec as you except mine will have 4 gb ram.

 

How did you order it? HP.com won't ship to Canada. I would love to be able get a customized HP Envy rather than the crappy 1050 model.

Also, does the webcam work properly for anyone, or is it completely purple for all of you in this thread? The amount of negative publicity seems to be overwhelming.

 

This is my webcam ===

 

does ANYONE know when the refresh (3rd gen?) with the backlit keyboard is coming out? I'm on my 2nd envy and it needs to be returned due to an unresponsive click on the mousepad.

 

they just refreshed the hp a few months back....why would they do it again sooo soon.. sure they have the new ones out but that wont have them redo the envy 15 again

 

Just for fun I popped in a second 160GB SSD in there and raided them. Fresh OS loaded from scratch, all latest drivers, Intel RST etc. To my horror, it was giving me no more than 310MB/s read in HDtune. I unraided them and loaded the OS again. Single drive is giving me ~210MB/s read. For reference my XPS1340 was giving me all 250MB/s read from a G2 Intel 80GB SSD.

I then ran other tests, on both drives simultaneously. Any combination of stuff I did gave me no more than a combined ~300MB/s read performance. It looks like to me the two SATA ports in there are port-multiplied, meaning the 3gbps bandwidth of the SATA port is shared. It is pointless to have dual SSDs in here performance wise.

Just to rule out if it's some funny stuff going on with the 160GB SSD HP firmware, I popped them into my X58 desktop box. Raided I was getting ~500MB/s, single drive ~265MB/s.

This probably explains why the Dell felt more responsive to me.

 

@andye39s

Well that is all good info but you are testing the wrong benchmark for real world use. While the maximum sequential R/W numbers you got are significantly slower on the envy they really mean nothing as far as actual use in your computer. The only time you would be using max sequential speeds is when you transfer very large files in or out of your computer and to take advantage of those speeds you need to use the eSATA or USB 3.0 interface to another high speed (SSD) device, the other device will be limited to it's maximum write speed, so 200MB/s or 500MB/s read speeds don't matter if your bottlenecked by 105 MB/s write speeds on the other side... Sequential read is really just a marketing ploy to show the highest number, you rarely actually use this potential speed day to day. Obviously read speeds effect the load times of applications but most apps are comprised of 100's of smaller files so even with loading apps you are not using the full sequential read speeds.

The important numbers are the 4K random R/W. The envy in RAID0 has a controller issue that for some reason limits 4K read to ~15MB/s but 4K write is ~150MB/s. Compare this to un-RAIDed drives at ~15MB/s read and 24MB/s write and there is a big difference in write performance....

As I stated before, in normal use I do not notice any performance difference between RAID or non RAID, yes the numbers are much lower but IMO it is not noticable in normal day to day use...

 

But even with the unRAIDed speeds, your Envy is still considerably faster than a laptop with a mechanical drive, right?

 

@Kabobi

Yes, 'considerably faster' is a major understatement. It blows away any HDD. My point above was that RAID0 vs. non RAID is not a noticable difference in 'real world' use. For example; the windows WEI score for the SSD drives is 7.6 (non RAID) vs 7.7 for RAID0, and a fast HDD is going to be 5.x. So SSD's becomes the highest performance score compared to an HDD being the lowest score and the bottleneck of the system...

 

I just noticed an odd thing with the USB power (charging) ability on my envy. When I plug in my ipod or phone when the computer is on it charges normally and will continue charging when the power is off.... What I just found is that if you plug into the envy USB when the power is off there is no power available for charging

Is there any way to adjust the the USB settings so it has power available anytime the computer is plugged in ??

 

fully agree. after installing an SSD in the Envy i had to get one for my desktop too. single best upgrade since going from single to dual core CPU.

btw if anyone is looking for a X25-M 160gb there's a guy on hardforum, user drew726, who is selling new OEM units (g2) for $320-330 shipped. that's about 100 cheaper than newegg. i've bought two from him on separate occasions.

FS: Intel X-25M G2 160GB SSD New OEM $330, Sapphire 5970, Vapor-X 5870, Zotac GTX 480 - [H]ard|Forum

i know there are some SSDs on the market now with better write speeds (OCZ Vertex 2) but they cost more and the x25-m is well proven.

 

Oh yes I know, you're absolutely correct. Large sequential read speed is strictly a marketing thing. Still, I would have liked to see that the Envy is using the full potential of the SSD, *especially* dual SSD. I don't know if something is going on with my particular Envy and/or the current FW version (on F.24), being able to access only a single SSD (to its full potential) is a big turn off. I was planning to move all my VM stuff onto the Envy, thinking this thing will literally fly having multiple VMs going on at the same time. It'll probably still fly, but not all that a dual G2 Intel SSD can offer.

Someone asked if the SSD is still a performance boost from the regular HDD, YES IT IS - even with the seemingly crippled SATA controller HP put in here, it still completely obliterates a regular hard drive.

 

sorry if I keep asking, but when are the backlit keyboard/refreshed 15's coming?

 

do i have to repeat myself...lol

 

@Andye39s:
I have been using the envy in a RAID0 configuration, especially running 3 VM's at the same time. When I checked out all these posts about the slow 4k R/W performance I was a little surprised, then checked it myself and confirmed. After that I used 5 different computers with the same software (3 laptops, 2 Workstations..garden variety) and found out that ALL of them had really low number with the same test. I then put an arrsay of 4x seagate drives 7200rpms in a RAID0 configuration and that couldn't reach that number either.
So even though the numbers suggest a real problem with the 4k R/W times in a real application I can't see the slowdown.
I ran a test launching 3 VM's with 4 GB each assigned (2x VM Ware clients with blown up XP installs for my work and 1x XP mode) simultanously and went watching a movie on my host at the same time. Even though the boot process was slower all three of booted and came up in reasonable time.
I then started full Symantec Antivirus scans on all 3 VM's and while I work on my host on other stuff. The Envy handled that extremely well.
To compare I ran the same test on a quad core Workstation with a 2 drive RAID0 setup (also 16 GB system memory) and the Workstation would take FOREVER to even boot in. What worked in ~15 minutes on the Envy took almost 2 hours on the workstation.
A bigger Issue I found is the impact on BIOS version, I currently use F.24, but for some reason if I change to any other BIOS version the laptop hangs every hour, I have issues with the graphics (blue screen, etc..) and other little problems. This suggests that the heat management is ABSOLUTELY critical and that the range the Envy operates normal in is very small and for some laptops it may not even be a range rather a spot.
To prove that, I actually ran the laptop 3 days straight, with apps running, no apps running, lid down(but active), downloads for hours (on the VM's) while monitoring the temps with REALTemp and had no hang. Then I switched to F.26 or to older versions and I didn't even survive 2 hours in any other version without something hanging, LAN, Graphics, processes stooped, mouse was unresponsive but keyboard worked,etc.
Overall, I have to say that my VM's boot faster (at least when I start 2 at the same time) then my older Core2Duo Laptop @2.53 GHz using XP. In fact booting windows 7 and then launching my 2 VM's is still faster then using my older laptop. I also used latest generation seagate 7200rpm (2 drives) drives in raid0 on my old laptop. So there is something to say about synthetic benchmarks, real live usage is a combination of all and of course applies certain weighting factors when drive access occurs.
As a summary, as long as my laptop works I am more than exstatic about the performance and even compared to a Quad core workstation with RAID0 standard drives.
My coworker will get new SSD's next week in his Quad core workstation and then I will know more after runing some tests.

 

could have sworn I read about a slight refresh on the g2s to include the backlit as well. I may be delusional though.

 

@krugoh

Could you please drop the issue of b/l keyboards. There are other threads specifically dealing with the new HP releases, they would be a better place to keep repeating your questions since you obviously do not believe anyone on this thread when they answer you....

 

Just got my envy 15 this morning. I like it a lot so far, no black screen problem and the webcam work just fine. My raid0 ssd only reads 13mb/s though for random 4k but eh, it's still pretty fast.

Another question: If you have "fan always on" disabled in bios, does your fan turn on every minute or so then turns off after a few seconds even on idle?

 

More or less, yes. Every minute is to exaggerate it though... on the top of my head it turns on maybe once every 4-5 minutes if untouched. Maybe longer, depending on room temperature I guess.

But I can't answer for the i5's as I have an i7-720 but my guess is that the time between when the fans turn on is longer on the i5's.