*HP HDX DRAGON Owners Lounge, Part 1*

Yeah I've still got Vista home premium 64 installed on the stock HDD that I recently swapped out for an SSD drive - I'll stick that in and see if Vista suffers the same issues to rule out the OS as the cause, though given that Win7 crashed before even loading to the logon screen 50% of the time, I don't really think Vista is going to fare any better. I don't think my issues mirror yours either, as you're describing instability, where my issue is a straight up complete system freeze that it can't recover from - you know the kind, where it's playing a sound then suddenly freezes and plays the last half a second of sound over and over and over again...

The only other thing I can think of is upgrading to F.40, but I don't particularly want to end up bricking my machine, and at this point I'm inclined to think this is a hardware issue with that upper slot rather than something a BIOS flash will fix - a problem with the hardware itself.

EDIT: oops, didn't even answer your question! Yes, build 7100, right off the microsoft webby

 

Wow you have a repair center you can visit? Hmm. No problem man. I got a zig zaggy graph looking black stuff/lack of pixels for a second or two on bootup several times..but I haven't seen it in a long time. No idea what it is.. Maybe it has to do with the GPU Drivers?? I use the newest ones and haven't had it happen..though I don't really know what it is. Someone else probably will be able to let you know what's going on when that happens.

 

Yea I don't like the small right shift key either, HP techs told me they're different sizes, as I was also wondering if I could replace the HDX9000 keyboard for the backlit one from the HDX18..and it seems to be a big fat no unfortunately. What I ended up doing was just put velcro on the keys I thought I would miss so that I can distinguish between them just by touch. I put the velcro on top of my keyboard cover/skin..not the prettiest thing in the world but it works pretty well.

 

If anyone is interested there a Blu-ray rom for $65

http://www.shop4tech.com/item8322.html?r=500&siteID=lw9MynSeamY-KMyBreCy9VkH5v8unPDExA

Coupon Code: SS17

 

yes, a few blocks away from me and they are quite nice. i really hope it's just the blu ray drive. i want to keep my dragon. btw, if ever i update to f40 and it dies will they change the whole unit or just the board? is it worth upgrading the bios???

 

thanks. good peace of mind.

this is a really dumb question, and im afraid of the answer. i changed by bios password after all this bios talk, and im not sure i remember it (doh!) so i am afraid to turn my computer off, and just keep it on standby. eventually i will have to restart cuz of windows update or something.

please tell me there is a fairly easy way to either figure out or reset the bios, if it's the case that i actually don't remember it, otherwise i guess im screwed.

thanks.

 

I'm getting some crashing even with the 2gb/4gb set up now...

Should it come to it - would leaving one slot empty and having the 4GB in the lower slot, be a better option than going back to 1gb in the higher slot and 2gb in the lower slot?

I'm aware that the best configuration for RAM is identical values in all available slots (usually two), but I'm not sure whether going for one slot by itself, or two slots with less total capacity is the better option (remembering that even if I use both slots, the upper slot will still only be 1gb, rather than a matching 2gb).

 

It's an ugly process... you have to disassemble the HDX down to the system board to get at the RTC battery (little watch battery) and leave it out for 5 mins to reset password.

See page 74 of HDX service manual.

 

Thanks, then I will ask whether the keyboard of the HP Compaq CQ70 is compatble. Looks very similiar.

 

nice dude!! thanks for the heads up!! Anyone know if its easy to switch this out on the dragon?

 

Just turn off the HDX, unplug the power chord, take out the battery, might as well hold down the power button for 30 seconds, unscrew the screw on the bottom, pull out the drive, put the new one in. Rescrew in the (I think its just one) screw on the bottom for it, plug in, turn on the HDX and you should be good to go.

 

hell yeah thanks Dom. You dont have to swith out the faceplate? with the original one?

 

Those looking for a dragon a little heads up. I will be posting mine up for sale this weekend

 

Very true, however I happen to have access to surface mount assembly / repair equipment (used to work at a local company that is an HP & SUN repair center).

Still looking into the clock architecture, so no comment yet.

 

my buddy claims that he just installed this card in his dragon and it works!!!! anyone can verify if this is a myth or fact?

http://www.laptoptricks.com/?cat=54

 

Tell him to sign up and post his work/steps. No one can verify if works or not except him.

 

well i just spoke to him, told him about this thread and says that he has no interest in posting anything lol. However he did say he would bring it into my office tomorrow to show it to me. So I guess I will let you guys know tomorrow :/

 

guys, if you cannot erase your files on your dvd+rw, it should be a faulty blu ray rom right?

 

I am bitterly disappointed, the first day I got my Dragon, turned it on was wrapped, updated vista did some work turned it off and went to undock the remote, no way it was stuck in tight, this is one month ago, off it went to be fixed, to be told cannot fix it would break the remote or top case to remove, so HP said they will replace my laptop, goodie, nope, then came the phonecall from HP, we do not make this model anymore and cannot fix it, we will give you new PC dv7-2012tx, this was not to the value of my dragon, so had numerous phonecalls and threats to India saying they must replace my lappie with one of the same value, this is Australia and that is the Law.
After hours of bickering, I never gave in and am being sent a dv7-2014tx, yes a smaller screen but higher up in specks, but alas my deam machine is going, next week, I will have been without for 5 weeks, I am a not Happy Jan
Crazymoona

 

Damn that sucks man! sorry to hear that. This laptop is for sure unique. If you have your heart set on this laptop, ask them to refund you your money and buy one on tiger direct or ebay. Thats where i got mine and it is defenatly the best laptop i have ever owned. Better then my macbook at that!

 

Hey dude im thinking of upgrading to that SSD drive cuz the one i have sux balls! it freezes allot. However will i have aproblem with the vertex on the firmware side if i install it on the dragon?

As always thanks dude!

 

You think you could at least get the run down on how he did it please? If that's true, I and I think many others will be VERY excited to know it works!

 

Wow that really sucks. One thing I'm wondering is why put up with talking to India? If I were you I would not open it, call HP Tech support and NOT TALK TO INDIA but talk to US or Canada peeps during regular hours (or hang up till you get them), and tell them your situation. A case manager should be able to help you. AT VERY LEAST they should have given you options and were supposed to get your OK to send that out first..the HDX18 is a comparable model, but NOT the DV7 by a long stretch.. I actualy negotiated to get almost the best specs on my DV 9700 when I had one..and they would not dare offer me some 6700 or some other cheaper laptop. Lastly, if I were you, I'd be PISSED OFF.

PS: Did you send it in JUST because the remote control wouldn't come out? I heard of people having had the option to screw it into the HDX so it wouldn't come out..have NO idea why anyone would want to do this, but I remember one dood who was selling his HDX on Ebay had video and explained that he CHOSE that supposed cto option..

 

Hmm I don't know.. If you need to you should be able to find one cheap on Ebay I would think OR the person selling it could possibly make one available. I've seen them being sold WITH the faceplate AND without I believe.

 

If my HP QuickDocks don't ever end up working (I'm getting my second HP replacement this or next week..the one they sent was busted already..) I think this ZVBox may be the best option I could get to broadcast what's on my HDX to my TVs and or Slingbox...:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/05/01/zv-takes-your-vga-signal-and-pumps-it-out-over-coax/

and

$399
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0018L7NUA

What do you guys think? Cool no? I want to be able to have the option to not JUST access and stream an external hard drives video and audio content but also a DVD or Blu Ray I put into my BR player on the HDX, any online a/v like Youtube/Hulu, or downloaded stuff. It even comes with a remote control so you can even control your mouse with it. I haven't seen any reviews just yet but I think at least in concept its pretty cool. Thought I'd share..but man, a 9800 in the HDX...If true, sweet no??

 

'Bout time you jumped on the SSD bandwagon! You are correct, too, that the Falcon's are a great drive. Put two of them in a RAID 0 in a Dell XPS 730x "supercomputer". 400Mb/s reads and 240Mb/s writes. Damn! Only problem with RAID'ing them is you can't trim a RAID set (yet).

Once you've had a fast SSD, you never go back to spinners, eh?

 

The problem you will have is that if it comes with firmware 1.10 (1370), you will not be able to update it to 1.30 (1575). Not that it matters greatly, since 1.10 is good enough. By good enough, I mean you can use TRIM (wiper.exe) to maintain peak performance.

You will find wiper.exe (the Trim program) on OCZ forum.

BTW, I just bought another Vertex SSD and it came with firmware 1.30 on it.

 

Spinners are for backup or long term archiving... ONLY!

 

Cool. Just have a look at his control panel and device manager under display adapters.

Find out where he got the 9800M GTX card from and if you can how much he paid. Also, find out what sort of temps, especially high temps he's seen.

There's not much to ask since it would be a drop in job - as in you would just drop the card in.

 

Wait, you mean the remote was stuck in the remote dock? There's a screw that holds it there if the model you have was used as a display model to prevent theft. It's on the bottom.

Ask for your HDX back. There's nothing wrong with it. A DV7 doesn't even come close and if you can't get your remote unstuck, live with it and buy a new remote.

 

The purpose of the screw was to secure the remote control when on display at retail stores, otherwise people would steal them. Don't know what they would do with them since they only work with the Dragon, but then some people will take anything not nailed down.

 

Haha true. Ah I see. Makes sense. 2.0 got to that before you but thanks too. I HOPE they will give back his HDX.. if not I would be furious..unless he wants an HDX18 which is apparently what they have been using to replace the HDX9000..

 

Assuming they do give him his HDX back and don't lost it in some storage facility like the lost Arc of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, do you think it would be easy to break off the remote in order to replace it with a new one? Without ruining the outer plastic?

Please please please do find this out!

 

As I said, all he has to do is check an info screen to see if the card shows up.

I wouldn't post the info on the 3700M yet. If this pans out, and if Comptrekkie can successfully install a quadro, we ought to buy one each before the goldrush starts.

If this does pan out, it'll make 2.0's public dismissals of my contention that the MXM is NOT proprietary, and that an MXM upgrade IS possible, seem pretty lame. He slammed me on this as well as the WUXGA deal.

You know, if any reviewer of an expensive laptop had seen a dingy, fuzzy screen like Lancorp's (held up as the gold standard by 2.0) don't you think they would have noted it in their reviews? Even just one reviewer?
This has nothing to do with comparisons. Nor with the WUXGA's over 90% color saturation vs the WSXGA+'s 72%. Nor with Erik's comparisons of several models.

Oh I forgot. Erik is supposedly me. I'll tell you, it's pretty expensive running a whole computer business in Illinois remotely from LA just to maintain a fictional identity. It just tires me out.

Keep your fingers crossed on the GPU, but don't be disappointed if this one doesn't turn out. I still believe the techs who told me it's possible, backed up by subsequent investigation.

C'est la vie.

MXM!

Adam

 

It's risky buying the 3700M. It's more expensive, and is (from my recent conversation with a tech) less close in architecture to the 8800M series. Even though there is a video BIOS on the MXM, there is possibly something critical in the way the GPU communicates to the system BIOS.

From what I was told, and what I gleaned from MXM upgrade, even if the MXM substitution works it may not control the fans properly.

Also, if the MXM upgrade works, a NEW heatsink should be installed due to the greater power consumption and waste heat. This is what successful modders have done.

Still, if somebody wants to take the risk, the 3700M does give a higher frame rate on 3D Mark06. But if you look at the market for these cards, there is a difference (apparently) between the one used in the Clevo, and the one used in the Elitebook and the Lenovo. the 9800M GTX is probably the more conservative bet.

 

guys, if you cannot erase your files on your dvd+rw, it should be a faulty blu ray rom right?

 

Regarding overheating and fans, this is from MXM Upgrade.

"Unfortunately, things may even get worse when tossing in a new card. If the system bios is not capable of retrieving temperature information from the new card it may simply not react to GPU temperature. This is not really a problem for the low end cards (the fan will react to the CPU and that's good enough). Midrange cards will normally be a bit hotter during regular desktop activities but should be cooled sufficiently while gaming (when the CPU is also pushed). High range cards will overheat quickly without proper fan support.

Unfortunately, we do not have the 'weight' to ask major manufacturers to revise the system bios on a product they do not even sell anymore. And so we are on our own on this one. Best we came up with so far is a script for NHC (Notebook Hardware Control). So first task: download NHC. After installation, download our modified ACPI files. Lookup the directory of NHC under the program files. There should be a directory "ACPI" there. Extract the files there, overwrite whatever the PC asks to overwrite. If you now restart you will note the the ACPI tab is now available. Please note we currently do not have a ACPI file for all notebooks.

You should enable only one setting of the fan. For high-power cards, setting the fan to full speed is absolutely mandatory. For non-intensive desktop tasks, setting the fan to a lower speed is ok. For mid-range cards, NHC is an optional.

The script doesn't really solve the root problem but rather finds a way around it. It writes a fake CPU temperature back to the system which then assumes the CPU to be very hot. To cool it down again, it will rev up the fan, automatically also cooling the GPU. Unfortunately, this also means that you loose the ability to read the 'correct' CPU temperature. You will only see the fake temperature (or an average between the fake and real temperature)."

No notebook manufacturer "supports" gpu upgrading as the MXM platform was designed for the expediency of the manufacturers, not the end user. So. although I believe it's possible, the end user has to be flexible. In this case, living with the fans on all the time might be the tradeoff.

My first (conservative) choice is the 9800M GTX, although I'd like to try the 3700M to push the envelope because of the higher frame rate and increased shaders. Usually the 3700M is much more expensive, but the prices have fluctuated recently.

I have no idea about the architecture of the 280M.

By the way, the author of the article refers to "desktop" activities, but the mod is to a Uniwell based laptop.

MA

 

Sorry. I meant to include this link:

http://www.mxm-upgrade.com/Fujitsu.html

MA

 

The 9800M GTX is currently $500.00 on ebay from a US seller.

The 3700M Quadro (for Dell) is $600.00 on ebay from a US seller.

If you have a greater tolerance for risk, you can get a Quadro for $380.00 from Taiwan for the HP/Lenovo variety. There may or may not be subtle differences between them the Quadros listed for the different models.

 

$500 is a good price but I don't have 500 to throw away to just check if it will be working. Knowing HP and reading carefully mxm-upgrade page I suspect that HP made that process not trivial if possible at all

 

Exactly. It's been tried on many HP notebooks and has never worked before for a number of reasons. But the HDX is one of the few HP notebooks made by other then Compal and Quanta.

I'd be happy to eat crow. But we'll see...

 

Nice to see you back. BTW, have you unboxed your HDX yet?

 

Not necessarily. Have you tried other media and had the same results?

 

this is kind of funny. when i first got my hdx, i popped out the remote. read instructions that came with it, etc. and it said something about screwing it in and it came with some screw. but it first said to pop off the bottom (there is a top and bottom) rubber thingy covering the screw hole, so i did that, and was wondering how the heck do i screw the remote in and more importantly...why??

i thought i had to do this. until now, i didn't know it was meant for retail stores!

so now i think im missing the little rubber thingy that i unpeeled. but it doesn't matter as it still snaps into place, and does not get scratched or what not.

so, to be screwed in, you have to remove the batter cover on the back of the remote, and you can see a little brass hole, that lines up with the brass hole (threaded also) where it docks with the hdx.

you can screw in the little screw thing in one side, but was a mystery how to continue screwing in the remote, since you cannot spin it around.

it must be that the hdx has to come apart and screwed in from the inside out, which seems a chore.

might be another solution to your dilemma.

 

For anyone intersted in buying a 8800M GTS i just bought one from ebay for 71 bucks new!

I have been looking around and the part is online for aobut 300+ bills if you can find it. After several months of looking there is a dude on ebay that has a partsstore that sells them!

Im going to have geeksquad come over to my house to intall it, with the online rebate they wil come in home and instal it for 50 bucks and covers insurance on your install!

mesage me if you want the sellers name!

 

Just called him, hes coming over right now.

 

make sure to get details. thanks. i hope you are talking about 9800gtx that he installed, and not the 8800gts. thanks.

 

I have quickly checked F.40 BIOS downloadable exe from HP support page.

After sp41251.exe extraction there are 4 file:

Code:

HPQFlash.exe 
update.exe 
ATI.CAB 
NV.CAB

As you can see there is one BIOS file for ATI card and one for Nvidia. Inside each cab file there is ROM.bin file which is VGA bios for ATI or nvidia. Let's look inside nvidia ROM.bin file.

Inside you can find the following string: HP Orion 1.1 NB8E-GT BIOS Ver. 62.92.23.00.17 Copyright (C) 1996-2007 G92 Board - Chip Rev. NB8E-GT means 8800m GT(S) graphics card. Just to mention that 8800M GTX is tagged as NB8E-GTX and Quadro FX 3600M is NB8E-GLM.

• That is kind of HP bios file standard (HP Orion) which is unreadable by nibitor as does contain both system BIOS and VIDEO bios.[

• It should be possible to run Quadro FX3600M, Quadro FX3700M or 8800M GTX cards in our notebook assuming that we have HP mxm version of such card. Quadro cards are even available as HP spare parts. Question is if video part of the bios is required to be changed to support those (In PC desktop world it was possible to flast GT card with GTX card video BIOS - it means that you could run 2 different video cards with one bios)

• GeForce 9800M GT and GeForce 9800M GTX are also both G92 family thus assuming that we have HP mxm 9800 card is should be quite possible to run it in our notebook.

Warning! - The part of Video BIOS could be a problem as graphics card memory timings are stored and loaded from video bios. Using 8800 video bios to power up 9800 card may cause failure because of inappropriate memory timings.

 

Posted this last week....no takers?

 

i hear what you are saying, but isn't the video bios onboard the actual graphics card. that is what i thought.