HP Envy 15 owner of 2 years, internal upgrade possible?

Hello everyone, a while back I decided to get a nice laptop for audio production and ended up buying a HP Envy 15. I got it just under ~1000 refurbished off ebay and it has been one of the best computers I have ever owned.

Being that it's nearly 2 years old, I was wondering if I could open it up to upgrade some of the internals such as HDD, RAM, processor. I'm almost positive the graphics card is onboard but to my surprise it runs great, it has 2gb ram build in just for the graphics and I see no need to upgrade it as most of what I do is processor/memory intensive. It came with a higher end Intel i5 at the time, I believe it goes up to 3ghz but I'm not positive, and has 4gb RAM but a VERY small HD (320gb). I really want to upgrade to an i7 with higher GHZ & maybe add another 4gb ram if possible, but I know notebooks are not as easy to upgrade as desktops.

Anyways I am a happy owner of the notebook for over 2 years and would recommend the Envy 15 to anyone. Only problem I have is that the stock battery seems to come loose easily but chances are that is my own fault considering I am not a very gentle user at times Also after two years use my battery is drained quickly without being plugged in, I'd be lucky to get an hour an a half on power saver.

Thanks for the help with this in advance, I'm hoping to keep my envy for a few more years!

 

Where to start. If you want a Quad Core and you are on the 4830M, I do recommend for you to get a motherboard with USB 3.0 and the 5830M. That can boost your graphics performance on top of USB 3.0 and Quad i7 support to the maximum.

Furthermore the USB 3.0/5830M motherboard gives support for 4 RAM Slots over 2 RAM Slots. So you can get your RAM up to 16 GB. I also suggest in a HDD as well and a new Battery.

So in summary, yes you can upgrade the Envy and you can even upgrade the Motherboard as well! (To an extent of course).

 

Thank you! that is very good news to me, although I'm almost positive my envy has USB 3.0 already although I'm not sure how to tell what my model version is. Is there any thread/tutorial on going about these upgrades? I have built and upgraded desktops before but have never worked with notebooks. My only experience is opening up an old netbook a while back to put in some extra ram :|

 

Sorry for the double post but I've been doing some research on internal upgrades on the envy. To my surprise it seems quiet easy, the only thing I'm having trouble with is finding what gen motherboard is in my envy 15. In the bios it states that my system board ID is 1522, but I'm unsure as to what that really means :|

I've also looked around this forum about replacing keyboards, I recently saw that the HP envy beats includes a "full-size Radiance backlit keyboard". I read that you can't replace the envy 15 keyboard with the 14 backlit due to size differentials, but would there be any issue replacing my stock envy 15 keyboard with the new backlit one?

Sorry for all the questions, just wan't to make sure I do things right before tinkering around with the insides of my prized notebook haha

 

Lightss, you're having second generation (aka first refresh). And there's no much for you to upgrade apart from other first gen intel i mobile cores, HDD/Hybrid SSD/SSD, Rams and display (if you're not satisfied with current one). And you can't replace the keyboard to a backlit one, as far as I know there's no such replacement for the Envy, even if you mod it, it can be hard or near impossible to achieve.

 

That seems like plenty of parts to upgrade to me, my work is not very graphic intensive so the onboard card suits me well. I have an i5 2.53ghz processor & 4gb ram, thoes are the two main parts I am interested in upgrading. I have a single dead pixil on my display but it's certainly not worth swapping the LCD out.

Is there any way I can use the newer intel i mobile cores? I am looking into an i7 with ~3ghz, as well as another 4gb of ram. I use an external audio mixer when tracking which can stress out my processing speed as the project progresses :|

 

I'm not so sure if you can upgrade to a i7 quad (hopefully the sockets are the same). Are you running 4GBs with 2 DIMMS ? If so the only way is to get larger stick.

or

if you need a new motherboard to suit the i7, you can utilize the current 4GBs (if 2 DIMMS), and add 2 more sticks of the same model.

sidething: you don't have USB 3.0 atm. It's only equipped in i7 motherboard (one with 4 DIMMS). But you don't really need it, trust me, still a long way to use it daily.