HP QuickPlay without booting into Vista

Is there a way to make HP QuickPlay work without booting into Vista? Why? Cause that way I would be able to preserve so much more battery life, especially for the flight I have this weekend where maximum battery would be best. Also, is there any way to play .mkv files with HP QuickPlay? I can play them fine with Windows Media Center, WMP 11 (d/l K-Lite Codec Pack) and VLC Media Player but they don't even appear in the HP Quickplay selection area. I have Vista Home Premium and HP QuickPlay 3.2 (3928).

 

no, with vista, HP removed the Quickplay direct functionality
so, you have to boot into windows to use quickplay

 

It is not HP fault the problem is that Vista takes the priority over other partitions in the hard drive. As far as I know Dell is the only manufacturer that have been able to make it work, the rest then like HP and Sony have not fix this problem.

 

Are you 100% positive that Quickplay doesn't boot right into it without going into the OS? I guess I didn't have my laptop long enough to test it out, I decided to send it back and build a desktop instead. That kind of defeats the purpose of Quickplay, I mean it was created to allow for longer battery life because you wouldn't have to boot into the OS to play media. HP shouldn't have released it with Vista if they couldn't pull it off. I love how companies just throw stuff out there and start selling it even if it's not 100% ready for release.

Also, Vista might take priority over other partitions, but then all HP would have to do is put the boot option for Quickplay inside the BIOS and whenever it is hit send instructions to boot off of the Quickplay partition. Vista, and every other OS, doesn't even start to load or control things until after POST and BIOS finds the first bootable device, set by you in BIOS. This should have been an easy task for HP to accomplish and It's kind of disappointing that they couldn't do it.

 

It was discussed either early on this year or during the summer when people were complaining about this issue. And some one said that Dell's version of quick play worked with the new Vista machines. That is all I can say. I know for sure the that Sony's version doesn't work since one of my friends recently got a new Sony Vio and he have not being able to used with out the booting Vista.

 

So your saying if I install XP it would work? What about with dual-booting XP & Vista?

 

Yes, but only if you have the Quickplay Direct software(version 2) and install it. Vista uses a different version of QP(ver 3) which wont work in XP.

It wont work in a dual boot situation.

 

Does anybody know whether HP are ever going to resolve this issue? Is it even possible that they can fix the problem? I really like the HP Pavilion DV2699 Special Edition laptop, but it's a shame how the HP QuickPlay is not fully functional on this machine.