HP Spectre 13T-3000

Hm, it's an m.2 drive? I thought it was msata. It looks like it from the maintenance manual.

I'm planning to get it fully loaded (except for Win 8 Pro). I figured the 2x scaling to 1280x720 would look alright... I just know the Inspiron scaled from 1080 to 720 looks weirdly fuzzy.

Can anyone let me know if they get any "buzzing" through headphones with the laptop? My hp dm1 has some minor buzzing but my Inspiron is loud to the point where it interferes with listening to music.

 

Thanks for the no-buzzing-from-that-area-of-the-keyboard confirmation. I had this exact issue with an XPS13 model that I owned and it was my main concern with a new ultlrabook.

 

Got my replacement Spectre yesterday! So far so good will report if new one chirps and how it handles Civ5.

• Windows 8.1 64
• 4th generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4500U Processor + Intel(R) HD Graphics(For 8GB Memory)
• Onboard 8GB DDR3 System Memory
• 13.3-inch diagonal Radiance Full HD Infinity LED-backlit Display (1920x1080) Touchscreen
• 256GB Flash Solid State Drive
• No Additional Office Software
• Free Upgrade to 1-yr McAfee LiveSafe service(TM)
• 4 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
• No Internal DVD or CD Drive
• Backlit Keyboard
• Included 2 Year Warranty
• Webcam and Microphone
• 802.11 AC WLAN and Bluetooth(R) [2x2]

Merry Christmas to me!

 

Congratulations on your third unit!:thumbsup: The dust on the screen and the dent on the bottom panel would have been enough for many folks to just give up on the 13t-3000.

Good luck, Jim

 

I just received my HP Envy 15t-j100 Quad TouchSmart yesterday and mine had a blemish in the screen too so I had to send it back.

I'm hoping that the Spectre 13t-3000 that is due for delivery on Friday doesn't have any problems.

Just in case (and because the 20% discount is back), I just ordered another 15t-j100 (even better specs than the one I just returned).

Hopefully I will eventually get an HP laptop that is blemish free. I am thankful for HP's return policy but they need to get their quality control problem fixed. It is very frustrating to wait on your new laptop only to have to return it.

 

Yeah, m.2. I have the 128 as mentioned but someone confirmed the 256 is SanDisk SD6SN1M-256G-1006 which has an ebay listing showing it as m.2. It was also confirmed somewhere earlier in this thread (around page 40 or so if you want to hunt).

Buzzing: yes and no. There is audible electrical noise, but it is not audible when you play music. However, this is with dinky earbuds. I tried it with some over-ear headphones that are a little bit better made and the sound is gone.

 

Yea, I'm planning on transferring some music onto it today. I had 'buzzing' through headphones with my ENVY and this was defiantly a Beats Audio thing. Once I turned off Beats, although the sound was a bit hollow and tinny, the buzzing when away. But even with the buzzing, the sound was just much nicer with Beats on. Through the speakers, the Spectre sounds awesome - loud and clear.

 

Yea seriously the buzzing below the keyboard on my ENVY was certainly there if you put your ear down to the keyboard, but you couldn't hear it otherwise. But it was still annoying knowing it was there, such a relief there if no noise on this one.

 

Yeah, I think that's normal. The Dell buzzed audibly even if I was playing music. It even buzzed when the laptop was muted.

 

Just discovered that the SD card slides all the way in flush. So, adding a big SD card might be a way to add a decent amount of storage. I just went with the "128" GB SSD which in reality is a lot less space than that.

 

So I did some research and turning off beats doesn't give you a flat profile, it actually negates what beats does. IE beats bumps up bass to +5, turning it off puts it at -5. I definitely like the sound more now that I've uninstalled the beats driver and just used the standard windows one.

Side note--this is my first time with HDMI on a computer...any helpful tricks for turning it on as an output? I tried my tv and I tried a hdmi->dvi adapter for my monitor and neither works

 

Press Windows Key + P to select the presentation mode

List of Windows 8 Shortcuts - Yash's Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Merry Christmas!

 

Thanks for the advice. Further testing leads me to believe the stuttering is due Google Chrome 31.0.1650.63 m especially when the notebook is on battery power.

Below are a few snapshots of CPU utilization playing back the same YouTube 1080P HD video clip full screen both on an off battery power.
Chrome - Plugged-in


Chrome - Battery (Stutter City)


FireFox 26.0 plugged-in


FireFox 26.0 - Battery (Acceptable playback)


IE 11 - Plugged-In


IE 11 - Battery (Smoothest playback)


Chrome clearly has the highest utilization and the worst playback IMHO. I'll switch browsers but I'm a little disappointed having to do so.

Source: Red Bull Signature Series - Rampage 2013 FULL TV EPISODE 14 - YouTube
Time: 0:39:00 - 0:40:17

 

Just figured my issue out--just needed to reinstall the intel driver and it worked. Thanks though

As for youtube...I realized that my chrome was set to use HTML5, so thats probably why our cpu usage was different. Make sure you have it enabled here: youtube.com/html5

 

Fair point about flash, yes it does use a lot of use and memory resources. So exactly how bad is the fan sound? My current system makes a fairly loud high pitched fan noise whenever it is under load. I really hated it at first but now I'm just used to it. How do you compare the Yoga 2 pro's display to the QHD display on the Spectre 13?

I'm pretty excited to have a device with such great build quality and screen quality

 

This is better than the yoga screen in my opinion. Its such a high ppi already that the extra boost to 3200 did nothing for me, and the colors on here are better by a lot, even after lenovo pushed out a 'fix'. It could just be because I got the dpi settings set up correctly on here, but my impression is that the touchscreen is better (more accurate) too. I think the lenovo's keyboard is better, (a tiny bit), but the HP has a superior touchpad. I'm getting used to the sound, but it still irritates me a bit. Its even more irritating because now I'm hearing other noises I never noticed before...for example, my old lcd monitor has a little high-pitched buzz to it

 

The issue is with hissing through headphones. Beats is fine when playing through the speakers - at least it is on my ENVY and the Spectre. When I listen to music (or any sound) through headphones on my ENVY there's a hiss. It goes away when I turn the Beats profile off.

I haven't tested music through headphones on the Spectre yet.

Merry Xmas all!!

 

Since it seems like you have Firefox and Chrome installed alongside each other, make sure you disable one of the two Flash plugins in Chrome. I'd try disabling the NPAPI plugin first, and if that doesn't improve playback then try disabling PPAPI and enabling NPAPI. These can be found in chrome://plugins.

 

I don't have any headphone issues with beats audio at present. The machine is rock solid and I'm loving it thus far. I do regret going for a QHD screen over the 1080p panel though .... I'm running it at 1080p with 100% scaling (I need the real-estate) and some text isn't as crispy as I'd like... Cleartype can't do much for the awkward pixel count lol

 

That's one reason that I opted for the 1080 screen. I just figured that the QHD screen was a little overkill on a screen this size. My old eyes can only see so good anyway.


Mine is supposed to be delivered on Friday. Looking forward to checking it out.

 

Well I ordered mine last night, "fully loaded."

• Windows 8.1 64
• 4th generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4500U Processor + Intel(R) HD Graphics(For 8GB Memory)
• Onboard 8GB DDR3 System Memory
• 13.3-inch diagonal Vivid QHD Infinity LED-backlit Display (2560x1440) Touchscreen
• 256GB Flash Solid State Drive
• 802.11 AC WLAN and Bluetooth(R) [2x2]

Hoping I don't regret the QHD display... I don't really need the screen real estate so I figure I can always use it in a "retina" like mode with 2x scaling at 720p...

 

So I seemed to be getting mixed messages with respect to how HP's customer service is. I'm thinking of sending my Spectre in to see if there is a problem with the fan (basing this off of a few people who've claimed that their Spectres have no distinct "ultrabook whistling" effect).

Do you guys know that if I send my Spectre in for repair and they send it back saying there's not problem whether I'll still be able to return it (especially if I get it back from HP after the 21 day return period)? I really want to keep this laptop, but I can't deal with the high-pitched whistling mine's making (gives me a headache), so I'm willing to send it in to see if that's standard on this laptop or not.

 

alot of pages to skim through on this site , but is the 802.11 a/g/g/n standard wireless card DUAL band or just 2.4 ? Right now , i don't have or need Intel AC , but dual band, even in N would be useful.

 

I don't think you'll regret the QHD screen. At least I don't regret mine. It's really nice.

 

I'm not sure if the N option is the single or dual band 7260N, but either way there are some speed issues with it. I would recommend the $20 upgrade.

 

I believe the Wireless-N is single band. I am not aware of any speed issues with this adapter. I get the same speed with this wireless connection that I get with my wired desktop, which is about 15% greater than my ISP promises.

Regards, Jim

 

If I were you, I wouldn't bet on HP taking it back after the 21 day period. I have heard that once that has pasted, you own it.

If you can't live with the noise, I would get a Return authorization from HP as soon as you can. You can always order another one if you decide to.

 

Congrats! I hope that you used the 20% off code. :thumbsup:

I should get mine on Friday.

 

Well, it's the Intel 7260 N (which comes in both dual and single band, hence the uncertainty). And that card has speed issues related to range in both the Inspiron and Ideapad that use it. If you're at your router it's fine but the speed drops off dramatically when you're even twenty feet away.

 

Hahaha I'm with you on that one . I thought scaling to 1080p will be better than it is and figured the QHD screen would be good for some fun

Congrats! If you don't mind scaling, you should be pretty happy with the screen

Do you run yours at full res with scaling? I'm running mine @1080p with 100% scaling and some apps (eg Skype) have not-so-great text rendering. Bummer.

Edit:

Anyone else finding the Intel Display Driver settings to be slow when switching between sections? I'm gonna take a risk and uninstall current drivers and update to the latest intel ones to see what happens.

Edit 2: HP won't let you install the drivers that are not from their website. If you try to install directly, you get an error saying that they are not the OEM ones and installation aborts.
If you try to uninstall the current drivers first, they are reinstalled automatically (either after reboot or after a set period of time).
If you uninstall and manage to install the newer intel drivers before it installs the HP ones, the machine overwrites your install (time delay/ on reboot) and installs the HP one.
Looks like the only way to get around it will be to do a clean install lol. I think the HP Utility installed might be enforcing those rules so I might uninstall it completely...

 

I can't think of any reason not to run at full res. The QHD screen run at 1080p resolution will look pretty bad. You're better off running at QHD res and scaling the fonts to the size you like. Otherwise you will get tons of scaling artifacts.

As for watching 1080p video, let the video software handle the scaling, it will do a much better job since it's designed to handle that. The scaling at the hardware level of the laptop is much more generic and won't handle each application in the best way.

 

Yeah, I've traditionally ran every machine at full res. Non-integer scaling will always look back as it is handled atm. (It would be cool is MS did what I think Apple does by doubling the 1080p and then downscaling to make it look crispier. At the cost of performance, of course).

Gonna try the font-scaling next to see if that is significant . I wonder if I can convince HP to send someone to do a panel downgrade ....

What you you run yours at? native res with 100% scaling?

 

Right, okay, the Retina display is definitely a different thing. You can actually get PC's with the same technology. It's all handled at the driver level. Every application sees the same "real" resolution.

Nothing will be gained by running the QHD at lower than native resolution. I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you really don't have any other option.

There are a few apps that don't know how to scale up their fonts like Acrobat Reader XI (I don't like the metro App...). For this, I've just learned to squint. When things get really bad I bring up the Win8 magnifier. Even some HP apps don't know how to scale their fonts which is pretty funny. But honestly these problems are few and far between, so I don't see a reason to change resolutions.

It should be noted that QHD is exactly 4 times 780p resolution which most streaming HD movies from Comcast et al are run at. So conceivably you could run your laptop at 780p resolution and these video would look fine (the UI would look terrible), but I can't think why you'd do that. The video players know how to scale quite well and are probably optimized for video scaling in particular.

 

Mine definitely buzzes. Now when the screen goes to power saver mode, the buzzing has gotten significantly louder. It's really annoying.

 

I think you should return or get a repair. I don't think the buzzing is a sign of a deep problem - I actually think it originates from the fan. There's a metal strip that couples the fan to the heatsink on the CPU. If the metal strip isn't dampened correctly it could vibrate and create a buzzing noise. This is just a theory, but the same problem seems to occur in several other ultrabooks like the MacBook Air.

 

Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately it didn't work for me and the playback is still unacceptable.

I've switched browsers for the time being. Thanks again for your assistance...

 

Yeah, Apple took a risk with forcing either 1:1 or 2:1 scaling and it seems to work pretty well (after all, you can throw better processors in to help the performance). Oh well, I'll just patiently wait .

Honestly, I only hate how skype behaves since all the other apps I used work well anyway (FF, Visual Studio, Office 13, etc. ). I don't care much for video behavior (Movies are handled by my Pi ). Decided to use the full res + 125% scaling for now and though skype seems to ignore he 125% (reacts to all others though, which is weird), text is pretty readable. My eyes will probably hate me in a few years though lol.

Anyway, OSX had similar issues when Retina displays first arrived (and tons of apps still used Carbon) so it's just a matter of time before people take advantage of WPF and the more modern APIs.

Love the machine though. Might actually be able to control my upgrade itch for a year!

 

Skype looks okay to me. I think I have the systems scaling at 150% ("larger").

 

Oh really? That's odd. It is uniform to me as well but if you look at the title bar text rendering and the rendering of messages, you can see the difference in my case. 125% seems to be a sweet spot for me atm though. If skype is too stubborn, I'll just use the Metro version

 

I received my Spectre fully loaded two days ago and am having trouble accepting two annoyances with it.
1. The track pad seems "loose". Touching it towards the bottom causes it to give and click/bottom out (but this is not the click of the trackpad). Going further you can register the actual click with tactile and audible feedback. So you end up with confusing audible and tactile feedback that doesn't register as the click on the touchpad. Basically, it rattles a bit and seems like it wasn't secured properly.

2. Likewise, put it with the left edge down in your palm and grab the top right corner with your right hand. Hold it with the left edge down and right edge up. Wiggle the laptop by the top right corner and there's a large component that just flops around inside. The battery? In any case, again, just seems like it wasn't secured properly.

I noticed the touchpad annoyance right away but the loose innards took me a bit longer while. When I was handling the laptop I wondered why it was 'clunking around'.

You might think I'm overly picky but I assure you, I'm not one of those people who returns phones three times because of "creaking buttons" or some other silly imagined defect. This just seems really off for such an expensive laptop - even my $250 Asus doesn't have issues like this. (Or my old Dell laptop, Lenovo Laptop, or my Chromebook Pixel, or...)

So is it just my Spectre or is this commonplace?

 

Okay, this sounds like a real build issue and not an annoyance. I would either return the unit for a full refund and order a new one with the same specs or turn in your current unit for a repair. In a way I prefer to first approach so long as they will honor the same discounts you got with the original order. Either way this is definitely not normal and sounds like a build problem. Sorry you have to go through this...

 

I agree, Call customer service and get a RETURN authorization. They will send you an email with a return label. Just drop it off at a Fedex location and you will get a QUICK & FULL refund.

You can order another one (possibly better specs) right now with the 20% discount code that is currently in effect. :thumbsup:

I have returned 2 HP laptops in the last month and got quick refunds on both.

I just ordered another one with upgraded specs for the same price that I paid for the one I just returned.

 

By chance did you uninstall the HP utility and did it work? I intend to install the intel drivers for both the graphics and wifi. If you have to do a clean install do you need a version of Windows 8.1 separate from the recovery? I assume the laptop has a sticker on the bottom somewhere with a valid serial number you can use? I only have a backup Windows 8 Upgrade on DVD, which won't work. I'm just curious what the best way to install a clean copy of 8.1 that doesn't automatically install the HP utility or any other hidden OEM apps.

 

I have this too--is everyone else sure they dont? I got used to it but it was definitely weird to me at first. I figured it was just a fact of life with the annoying mac-like clickpad.

 

Mine doesn't do that. A push towards the bottom gives a definite click, nothing feels loose and nothing rattles.

Regards, Jkm

 

I have had my new Spectre for a few days now and am loving it! So far no issues this time.

 

Definitely a defective build. Looks like you'll have to return it

Nope, it isn't being enforced by the HP utility. I did notice that there is a Ruby script that runs on startup (I think it is an HP script) but I am no longer bothered enough to investigate. I believe the recovery partition will set your system up like it is now so the problem will probably still persist. You might need have to get an *.iso from MS ( eg: Download Windows 8 ISO (x86 / x64) File Directly From Microsoft | Redmond Pie ) and do a clean install of the right version (non-pro). I changed my HP key to Win 8 Pro though (I have a Pro key).

If you don't want HP's stuff, then you will have to do a clean install and then install the components as you deem fit. Is there a particular reason why you want to use the Intel drivers over the HP ones? In my case,I wanted to see if that will affect scaling issues but I'm getting used to 125% scaling now. Unless you really want a fresh start, it might be worth routinely uninstalling the various HP applications to see if that affects anything first

 

I was just in Best Buy and noticed that the display model didn't exhibit the issue with the loose touchpad. It also didn't exhibit any loose innards when lightly shaken.

Thank you to everyone who replied. I agree, I got a defective build and it'll be going back.

 

Thanks for the info guys. Mine is on its way back...I guess I'll go back to waiting for a new shipment. It wasn't a huge deal but I don't want to risk the trackpad breaking in some way.

 

Yea mine certainly has no shonky build quality. The track pad is great, the pinch zoom works even better after the Synaptics update.

It runs super quite and cool, I really can't comment on the so-called 'buzzing' from the fan. It's just a very quite ultrabook, when compared with a friend's MBA, they're the same.

The fan only kicks in when I've installed a new programme but it's still only what I'd call a 'fan' noise, not a buzz. But there is defiantly no buzz from below the keyboard which was the first place I stuck my ear.

Annoying how I have to use compatibility view on YouTube with IE as the browser doesn't recognise the plugins, so if you don't use compatibility view the cursor won't disappear in full screen mode - not an HP issue but IE and Windows 8! But I'm still happy using IE11 over the other browsers.

So far after a few days I'm still really happy with it, the build quality, performance and looks are great!