HP Spectre 13T-3000

Any help on getting Linux working on this thing would be appreciated. I noticed that some have got it working like hack6500, but I run into all kinds of issues that prevent the live image from starting up. The best results occurred when I turned off Secure boot and turned off APCI as part of the grub boot options and that got me to a desktop, but the wireless didn't work.

 

Anyone looking for a bargain - a [formerly] mint condition Spectre 13T???

A prospective buyer, not wanting to miss the smallest detail, asked me to take additional photos, after seeing one of the underside on which he thought he spied a slight discoloration on the tiny FAKE CHROME PLASTIC around the tiny rubber feet underneath the laptop .

In the process of turning the laptop upside down and taking pictures of the underside to highlight that the tiny little fake chrome rings were not discolored...it slipped off the desk, fell towards the floor and I - almost - recovered it before the corner of the lid got nicked on the floor.

Best offer over---$250??? So much for improving my financial condition.


]

 

duplicate post....sorry

 

OMG! Is there a small black cloud hovering overhead? If all you are going to get is $250, why don't you get a payday loan?

Jim

 

Lack of an SD slot on the XPS is a deal breaker for me. I think the build quality of the Yoga 2 13 is as good as the Spectre, but the Spectre looks more classy with the aluminum and "truffle" colors.

Regards, Jim

 

Agree about the SD card. The XPS, sadly, also has an annoying whine coming from the keyboard, like 95% of them do. I think you were really smart to get the Yoga 2 13 rather than the Pro; did you actually "get" or only order at this stage? Curious to hear if you still feel the build is as good as the Spectre's. I think the Yoga is very well made, but I think the Spectre is as solid as a rock - until it bangs against a hard floor .

 

Do you have to have a job to get one of those? Actually, I've lowered it to $700. Come one, come all.

 

450, Ill take it off your hands.

 

Well, I should have had it a week ago Thursday, but UPS delivered it to Melborne, Australia rather than to my house. A replacement order is scheduled for delivery Monday. My impressions on build quality are from checking out the Best Buy floor model. I will give you an update when I get my own Yoga.

Regards, Jim

 

Cute, very cute. Is that an offer of a payday loan? What's the interest rate?

 

Lovelaptops,

I sent you an email...I think I got the address correct from an earlier post.

CK

 

Has anyone seen the "new" laptops HP just released at Computex?

HP's back-to-school lineup includes lots of convertibles (and Beats products, too)

HP hedges its bets, unveils a 14-inch laptop running Android

 

Not one Spectre. I guess HP is dropping the Spectre line.

Jim

 

You don't know that, Jim. That's how rumors get started

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Tapatalk

 

You think my offer is cute?

 

On many applications, like Task Manager etc... They lose background color while running..... instead of a blue header, eveything changes to white, readable but no color.then may change back to blue??? Happens at other times also,,,,,,, any ideas.
tom

 

The lack of an SD slot a deal breaker on the XPS 13? Really? How often are you doing SD transfers? At least in my case, the cheap USB 3.0 card readers work great.

As far as the Yoga 2 Pro goes, just was not as impressed with it as with the HP Spectre 13T-3000 and XPS 13.

 

Although the whine on the XPS 13 has been a common complaint, I (and those around me including family/co-workers) haven't noticed it on my XPS 13 (i5-4200U) with the A04 BIOS. As previously mentioned, I still preferred the XPS 13 and HP Spectre 13T-3000 over the Yoga 2 Pro. The Yoga 2 pro keyboard was just not as responsive as the XPS 13, didn't need/want additional tablet, tent and stand modes or higher QHD+ (3200 x 1800). Unfortunately, even if you wanted the tablet mode, the keyboard was more exposed than the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga.

In the end however, none of these are bad machines and different features can appeal to different users.

 

The SD card slot is important to me. I don't use it for transfers. I use it for auxiliary storage. I have absolutely no interest in the Yoga 2 Pro. The Yoga 2 13 is the latest Yoga from Lenovo. I have mine now and it is great so far. The build quality is about the same as the Spectre, but the Spectre has a more "classy" look. The Yoga 2 13 is all black, no color anywhere. There is a very slight flex of the keyboard and there is very slight flex of the screen. Otherwise, the fit and finish is perfect.

Jim

 

Jim,
Really glad you got your 2 13 and all is well. I didn't realize it was all black! Soft touch or metal lid? Fingerprints? I'm glad you like the build. Just between us, one of the things I love about the Spectre is zero flex, like MBA or even tighter. With no Spectre available, though, I can see how the 2 13 is a good option. Good luck. Jeff

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Tapatalk

 

Either that or insulting; take your pick. $1,000 off for a small dent in the corner of the lid which did not damage the screen or effect operation in any way. Bottom fishing might be more appropos.

Have you tried going into Control Panel --> Display and adjusted the colors. Try resetting to defaults and see if that doesn't improve things. Alternatively, if the app is malfunctioning it will turn a milky white and you'll see at the very top that the words read (not responding). If that happens (most often for me with Firefox browser, either wait of close the app and restart. If none of those work you have a different kind of problem and I can't offer any other suggestions unless you are more specific of what you are doing when it occurs.

 

How much of an issue is the keyboard on these and does anyone know of anywhere in the UK which has them on display (or a model with a similar keyboard)

 

Theres also (what appears to be a new) spectre 13 pro in the UK (looks the same to me) http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/products/laptops/product-detail.html?oid=6658178#!tab=features

 

Can you clarify what you mean by "issue?" The keyboard is excellent - for an Ultrabook with limited key travel due to the thin chassis, but it gived clear feedback when a key press is registered and you don't have to bottom out. Still, I think the keyboard on the Dell XPS-13 is better, but not enough so to make it worth the tradeoffs, unless you are a professional writer.

Also, the backlighting is meant only for dark ambient lighting. If it is not dark enough for the backlighting to clearly illuminate all key masks clearly you will find the black lettering on the silver keys provide plenty of contrast to see them without backlighting turned on - saving battery life. The reflection of the screen onto the silver keys further accentuates the contrast to make key backlighting unnecessary, even detrimental. When the ambient lighting is low, the Spectre's backlighting is perfect, and perfectly uniform, unlike many others.

It's a bit of an adjustment from the more common black plastic keys with white key masks, but by no means unique - the popular Acer S7 premium Ubook, the Samsung Ativ 7 and a number of other mainstream models use the same scheme.

Perhaps I anticipated your questions after all (somewhat know for this !) By all means let us know if you have more.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Tapatalk

 

The travel is the main issue - how would it compare the the probook 430?

 

For auxiliary storage, I actually use USB 3.0 flash drives and an external 1TB HD drive. The obvious downside is the need to insert/remove it when needed, but for me at least that is the exception rather than the rule.

 

Yeah, I use a USB flash drive for data transfers and and I have an external HD that I use for backups. But, I like to have the SD card permanently inserted with music, videos and photos.

Regards, Jim

 

Actually forgot the mention the low profile flash drives, which you can leave in all the time.

 

I agree that can work but I find it far more convenient to leave a 128GB SD permanently in its slot (which means it needs to be one that does not protrude from the side as so many - but not the Spectre 13T - do) so that it's as if it is an internal flash drive. Of course, an SD card alone will not do if you need to have hundreds of GBs of data available. The slot is perhaps most valuable if one's budget can only afford a 128 base SSD in the system such that a permanently housed 128GB SD card is needed to store all data needed by the user.

Ok, I re Alice this is all quite obvious. I only meant to explain why for some, even those who have 256GB native storage, the fixed SD card slot can be essential. Regardless it does me as to why Dell continues to exclude it.

Sent from my GT-N5110 using Tapatalk

 

Sorry I still don't follow your line of question. What makes a keyboard better or worse for travel?

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Like you, I had trouble with Chrome until recently, and was using Firefox. Chrome, however, has just released a true 64-bit version in the Dev Channel (version 37) that looks and seems to work fine. The only thing is that you have to go to Java.com and download a 64-bit version of Java. All of my other extensions work as is though.

 

That's cool. Hope to see a new model soon for the USA.

 

So I got my replacement machine about 1 week ago,they keyboard is much better than the first. Actually I think the laptop is 100% perfect which I am happy about since it looks like I would not be able to replace it again. The did upgrade me to the core i7 for free so that worked out well, probably just using up the remaining inventory.

Now I have a question, and this is probably more a windows / software issue than hardware. When I hookup my external 1920x1080 monitor to the hdmi it just looks blurry. Even if I don't extend the desktop and set the monitor at the only display it still looks blurry. I thought maybe my eyes were just used to the nice display on the HP so I tried using the same monitor on my old laptop and it looks great. I have tried messing with the various scaling sizes, I assume is you set it to smallest it is not scaling at all. Any ideas on what else to check? And it is not just one application, like even the task bar / background doesn't look good.

 

Ok, so I got my Spectre about 3 days ago. To get you into my perspective, I'm coming from a 6 year old Dell Inspiron 1420....

The Good:
- Love the looks, the aluminium construction is really nice
- Really thin and light
- Coming from an older laptop, keyboard was a concern, but I find it very easy to type on. Key travel feels nice to me
- The FHD screen is really nice, a big step up from my Dell. Brightness could be a bit better though.

The "Bad"
- My unit has pretty bad lightbleed, but after the boot screen you can't really notice that much. Not a deal breaker for me.
- Touchpad takes a lot to get used to. I installed Synaptics drivers and now it seems way better, but I am getting random freezes where i can't move the cursor at all
- I had an occurrence where one of my speakers (the right one) stopped working. After a reboot it was fine.
- BATTERY: Ok, so this is the biggest issue I have so far. Lots of reviews quote amazing battery life, like 8-9 hours (and some people have said the same in this thread). But I am only getting around 5 hours, and let me tell you that I am not doing anything that can justify that performance. I have tested like 4 times only on battery, only doing light web browsing (like 5 tabs tops) and brightness around 50%. Am I doing something wrong?? Any special settings you have modified to get better runtime?

I have found that windows 8.1 has an internal battery report, I will attach mine so you can check it out and maybe compare with yours. The way to get this report is to open the command line (execute cmd) and paste the following: "powercfg /batteryreport /output %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\battery_report.html"
That will generate the battery report and you will find it in an html file at your desktop.

 

Trackpad: set the sensitivity setting in the Synaptics control panel to the lightest (all the way to the left). I was having the same issue and it is gone. I adore this trackpad since doing that, using the Syanptics drivers and tweaking them, and diabling HP's "Control Zones," which I found to be a nuisance more than anything else.

As for you battery, I suggest you do a calibration run, in which you charge it up to 100%, unplug and use it all the way down to zero (not a good practice, but once won't hurt), then recharge back to 100%. The battery info you showed only gave pieces of time on battery which I assume you extrapolated from, not running it from beginning to end. After you have done the calibration and are at 100%, unplug again and use on battery to at least 50% of capacity, the lower the better, but at least now your battery will be correctly calibrated so you can trust the extrapolations more. Still, no substitute for going from full to nearly empty. I also recommend a program called Battery Info View, which reports all the same statistics as Windows does, but in a more convenient format and, if you pin it to your taskbar all you have to do to get it running is to click on it once. You'll get accurate readings of how much power different activities draw as well as the longitudinal view of how much battery capacity is trained for the hours the machine has been running including when it was idling. Do you have the FHD or QHD screen? The QHD (which I also have) gets about 1.5 hrs less battery life than the FHD, and the latter should get 7.5-8.5 with casual use of the type you described.

As far as lightbleed goes, if you only see it at the Win dows/HP splashscreen ignore it - IPS displays do that when there is no OS-driven color filling the screen. The speaker thing sounds weird. Keep checking it. Could have been a fluke, but may need fixing by hP. Good luck. It's a great machine.

 

I'm finding that my wifi signal fluctuates a bit. It will be on 5 bars for a while, then suddenly 2 bars, then back to 5. It doesn't sem to affect the usability, but was just wondering if anyone else has noticed this. Is there a way to avoid it?

I'm using 5ghz AC wifi. Not 100% it's the laptop even (could be router) but thought it was worth asking.

 

Sounds like interference by other traffic. Try another channel.

Good luck, Jim

 

incase any of you all are still getting annoyed with chrome not supporting HiDPI correctly try using the canary builds, I just installed it and I'm not sure if anyone has posted this but its working perfectly, however you may run into bugs being the latest version of chrome..


Also just to clarify... Canary builds are the ones with the latest and greatest that are not yet tested fully, after being tested a bit more bugs are squashed and it is distilled down to the Dev builds and then Beta and of course Stable.

So Canary is 64bit just in case people wanted it badly. Anyone in this forurm I invite you to try the Canary build as it runs in parallel to your normal chrome installation, it will not replace the one you have installed but rather run next to it.

Also I'm sure the FHD is great but anyone with the QHD panel I invite you to put your computer in HP Recommended power mode (make sure that the CPU is scaling properly - not stuck at 1.68GHz, BTW if yours is tuck at 1.68, I find that sometimes just a quick jump in and out of sleep can sometimes resolve it or rebooting -which only takes like 20 seconds.) then open the canary build or stable build or any web browser that will handle WebGL nicely, and go to drinksmartwater.com to really see true power of what web technology can do now! FHD folks this will also look amazing but on QHD it just looks gorgeous!

drinksmartwater.com

BE WARNED: Your computers fan will spool up really high as this website is very GPU intensive near the end and you will see why.

 

So I have about a week left before my return window closes. While battery life is still a bit bellow what I expected, It did improve a little bit after a few cycles and a manual calibration. I can live with it I think.

1) My main concern right now is the touchpad drivers. They are driving me crazy to the point where I am considering returning my spectre. The HP drivers SUCK in comparison to the Synaptics. But the problem is that randomly I will boot the computer and my touchpad drivers are completely gone and I am left with the basic windows ones (where you don't get a right click or scrolling). At that point I have to reinstall and reboot two times in order to re-install the Synaptics drivers. This has already happened about 3 times in the last 2 days and it is SO ANNOYING!!!! I think the HP drivers don't have this problem, but they are completely unusable.
For the record, the synaptics drivers I'm using are version 17.0.6.13. There are newer ones, but I have not been able to install them (something to do with digital signature, apparently a synaptics problem as I read: Fixed: Cannot install Synaptics Touchpad Driver Windows 8.1 - RyuKent on Technology and LifeRyuKent on Technology and Life)
I think that If I am able to resolve this driver issue, I will probably keep the computer.

2) I have considered also a clean install of windows 8.1, but I'm not sure how to proceed. Has anyone done this??? Did you run into any problems from a license point of view? Will the key be completed automatically during installation? Are there any features like rapid start that I will lose by doing a clean installation? Also, I can't seem to find an official download of windows 8.1

3) The fact that there are no clear alternatives is also worrying to me. The Dell XPS 13 is scheduled for a motherboard update because of the coil whine, but that will happen well after my return window closes. Even then, having no HDMI or SD Card slot seems like a downgrade. It's a very difficult choice

Thank you very much for your answers in advance

 

I am tempted to change trackpad drivers, but I never had the issues you did (e.g. drivers not loading). As for the installing Windows 8.1, I don't know if anyone has done with with a clean, vanilla install. I did create recovery media and reinstalled mine that way. I uninstalled all of the bloatware and many of the Intel drivers and reinstalled them from Intel's web site. Intel's versions of video, Bluetooth, WiFi, Rapid Start, Rapid Storage, Engine Management, etc. do seem to make a positive difference.

 

Does anyone know what the F.14 BIOS update is supposed to fix? I just noticed that it is being offered up by the HP Support Assistant, but doesn't seem to be on the driver update page on hp.com yet.

 

Yeah, I also got that update, installed it, and got stuck at 1.77 Ghz on battery. It does not matter if you shut down completely or not. So it definitely does not fix throttle issues, it makes them worse. At least with F13 you can fix the throttle by doing a full shut down instead of a restart.
I reinstalled the F13 until HP releases the changelog for F14 BIOS

I got 2 days left to return my laptop.... i think I am keeping it, saw a Dell XPS 15 at a Microsoft Store the other day and I did not like the design very much.

 

Good to know; thanks.

 

Keep it. the HP spectre is a really solid ultrabook.

 

Funny, mine updated and now, no throttling in battery mode. Goes from .77GHZ all the way to 2.39.

 

I tried to install the F14 BIOS again, and now it works properly.... although I don't think its perfect because it did got stuck at 1.77Ghz at one point. A full shut down fixed it. Its probably not entirely fixed, maybe the same as in version F13

It would be interesting to know what is it exactly that they fixed with this update. Nevertheless, it's good to see that they are still working on updates even though the laptop has been discontinued.

Now if they only updated the touchpad drivers......

 

My i5-4200u goes to 2.6 GHz in turbo mode. I usually get 2.55 GHz when running a benchmark. (On battery.)

Jim

 

Just doubled checked; goes all the way to 2.86GHZ

 

I'm trying to recover the Spectre to its default state (full or minimal image, doesn't matter), and I always get a Restoration Incomplete error. I'm using the disc I made myself. Log says:

[ 7:42:22,38] ChkErrBB.CMD : Detect some error during PININST_BBV.
[ 7:42:22,38] ChkErrBB.CMD : Check c:\system.sav\logs\BurnBootWarn.log
[ 7:42:22,38] ChkErrBB.CMD : or, check c:\system.sav\logs\BurnBootMerge.log
[ 7:42:22,39] ----------------------------------------
[ 7:42:22,39] Critical error condition was detected at BBV1...
[ 7:42:22,39]
[ 7:42:22,39] Refer the following file if exists.
[ 7:42:22,39] - c:\system.sav\Logs\BurnBootWarn.log
[ 7:42:22,39] - c:\system.sav\Logs\BurnBoot.log
[ 7:42:22,39]
[ 7:42:22,39] Switch to 2ndCap's WinPE and show [Recovery Manager]'s Imcomplete dialog.
[ 7:42:22,39] because RM's dialog can't appear on [Start] screen on Win8 environment.
[ 7:42:22,39] customer may not notice RM already shows Error dialog.
[ 7:42:22,39]
[ 7:42:22,39] ----------------------------------------
there might be unexpected reboot during BBV Clean or Last...
The process will cause CTO panic because the image might not be normal...
there might be unexpected reboot during BBV Clean or Last...
The process will cause CTO panic because the image might not be normal...


Any idea? I checked the disc and are OK. A disc scan and quality check (PI/PO) shows correct, plus I used those disc a few months ago with no problems, and they are quality disc, so I dont think they have degraded so fast...

I tried deleting all partition except for the boot one (that's dangerous) and the msftres, with no success...

I am really not very afraid of this situation, because I can do a clean install of Windows 8.1 (I have done that thousands of times, and it's even better than using the default image, and I have a backup of the activation files made with Microsoft Toolkit ), but this situation is really weird, and I obviously don't want to buy a set of recovery disc from HP at a very low 40€... (motherf******... ), so... any idea anyone?.

Thanks in advance.

 

How are you guys seeing the clock speed? What app are you using to view this?

Thanks