HP Spectre x360

Skylake edition....

The Trackpad driver isn't remembering the setting to turn off reverse scrolling when restarted, so I have rolled back to Driver 18 of the Synaptic touchpad. Sad, but it works. I'd think HP would have fixed that for this released.

Also, ran into issues with the Intel HD520 driver that seems to be rampant on every platform that uses it. Was able to uninstall the current driver and use the Intel beta driver. The issue for me was the Display Driver crashing when using IE11/Edge on media-heavy websites. The beta driver seems to have corrected it. No crashes since the update.

Thirdly, this machine runs a lot cooler than my Broadwell X360. I don't mind holding it in table mode now that is doesn't feel like a hotplate.

Hope this helps...

 

Your experience has been very different than my own. I went through about 8 QHD i7 Broadwell x360s and 4 Skylake QHD i7s (Best Buy exchanging). I personally did not notice any difference in performance, battery life or heat between Broadwell and Skylake. I never put laptops directly on my lap, even on flights, I have my leather laptop bag between my lap and laptop, so bottom heat is not much of a concern for me. The top left corner of the deck, often became very hot on both my 5th and 6th gen CPU x360s. However, my real heat problem was under heavy load, the left palm rest would heat up (on both 5th and 6th gen CPUs). I'm wondering if always running apps like Dashlane, contributed to my experience being as it were.

Also with regards to your other post above, I am assuming brightness level had a huge impact. The Skylake Ash silver x360s I had, did not give me better battery life over the broadwell as I had hoped. However, on both models, I was able to get about 7 hours per charge (QHD display), while bluetooth on (I always use a Logitech MX bluetooth mouse), Wi-Fi connected browsing with Chrome and my brightness set to 20%, keyboard back light off and HP Recommended power setting on. I too had cortana off. Matter of fact, I said no to all of the settings options when you start the unit for the first time.

Even though I still use Chrome, you are very correct; it is a super power hungry app. I use and live by a chrome extension called OneTab. They have it on FireFox and now that Firefox has an iOS app, I am going to reconsider moving back to Fire Fox.

 

The same Bang & Olufsen speakers are present in all x360 models from launch. The Ash silver x360, has the logo printed on the deck, along with the copper trim as a special edition celebrating the anniversary of the Bang & Olufsen.

 

Ahh, did not know that. So the 1st edition Broadwell and Skylake have the B&O in them?

 

Correct! Every Spectre x360 up to the Ash Silver Skylake, all have the exact same speakers. I paid $70.00 more at the time at Best Buy, for the Ash Silver. Aside from the very awesome color, the only difference is the keyboard keys are black (which appear to be solid black rather than painted like the keys on the silver models) and of course the B&O deck logo. I think there is a thread on the hp.com x360 forum, about the speakers.

 

Ok, second round of battery after making the changes noted above and I am VERY IMPRESSED. BatteryBar clocked me in at 9:02 elapsed time. The full runtime average has spiked up to 7:34 up from 5:15. While I know this is subject to averages, the 9hr battery spread is encouraging.

To accomplish this, I am using the HP Recommended Power setting, put screen at 50%, kept the IE browser open(1 tab always, put 2 or 3 at a time during different sessions), disable the screen/hard drive/screen saver off settings so the screen would stay on. So this is 9 hours of screen on time.

Halfway through, I did install the Intel HD520 beta Display driver due to the DisplayDriver crashing that seems to be common with the HD520 drivers. The beta driver seems to have fixed it.

Very encouraged....Will keep you posted.

 

This is an issue with the Intel drivers. Sadly Intel refuses to acknowledge it, placing the blame solely on OEMs and Microsoft. Thankfully the latest beta Intel drivers significantly mitigates this for me (down from 3-4 times per day to 1-2 times per week). You are looking for driver build version 4326 (the ones from HP are actually 2 versions out of date).

Change: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTP\Install\DeleteUserSettingsOnUpgrade to 0 (DWORD 32-bit).

N.B. The Synaptic v18 drivers do not disable the trackpad in tablet mode. This can result in a load of erroneous clicks.

 

Great discussion guys, thanks for all the good info!!!

-Matt

 

I currently have the I7 256gb Signature edition from Microsoft after returning two other Spectres. The first two Spectres had a mixture of wobbly trackpad, awful backlight bleeding, and hard to press power button (depressed into the casing). For my third Spectre, the trackpad is perfect with zero wobble, there is a tiny bit of bleeding at the bottom of the screen but its barely noticeable, and no issues with the power button.

The two problems that I did notice was the squeaky case. First, under the laptop at the top where there is text, some times there is a click sound when I press it. And the last spot is the area right of the trackpad, if I pressed it hard enough it would make a creak.

On all three Spectres, the battery life was amazing. at 50% brightness and 5-8 tabs of Chrome, it lasted 1 hour for every 10%. I did have an occasional graphics driver crash.

So far I can live with the creaking, but it would be nice if there is a fix. I read that I could try screw it in, but at the risk of destroying the screw and voiding warranty... I will wait after a year. Also, I am having an annoying problem with the laptop awaking from sleep. My windows resize, and I have no clue why. I use 125% scaling which it is below recommended. Any one know a fix for that?

 

Someone else asked before but no one answered, what is the difference between the Intel HD Graphics 5500 and the new Skylake Intel Graphics 520?

 

From: http://www.game-debate.com/gpu/inde...s-520-mobile-vs-intel-hd-graphics-5500-mobile

 

According to Wikipedia:

HD Graphics 5500, GT2 – 24 execution units, up to 364.8 GFLOPS at 950 MHz
HD Graphics 520, GT2 – 24 execution units, up to 403.2 GFLOPS at 1.05 GHz

The game debate number is for the base clock which is irrelevant to gaming... also the skylake GPU supports DX12. Besides the above, the other useful features are the additional texture shaders and pixel shaders - resulting in faster performance.

Here is the best side by side performance I can find: HD5500 vs HD520 - so about a 10-20% difference in performance.

 

Thank you so much! Honestly I am thinking in terms of the new Rise of the Tomb Raider game coming out for PC in Spring 2016. Will this laptop be able to handle the game on low settings but with the textures set up to high so the detail doesn't look like crap?

 

Given the game isn't released yet I don't think anyone can definitively say.

Here is the HD520 running Tomb Raider (2013) - 20 fps and I would say barely playable.

I think you are looking for a gaming laptop.

 

Honestly I had HP's Omen gaming laptop, and I returned it.

The only difference in specs is a quad core vs. dual core and the graphics card. To me the 2 hours of battery life while gaming and an awesome looking game vs. 8 hours gaming with the graphics turned down is an obvious choice.

The Spectre is the best of both worlds if I get the i7 8GB of Ram 512ssd model. Plus this has a quad HD screen and the other one didn't. I was very disappointed in the Omen.

 

Here’s a crazy one – something for you all to try!

First note, I have crazy good hearing!

Regarding the “whine/electrical noise” from the Spectre x360, here are my observations:


With power supply plugged in:

Keyboard backlight on, screen backlight on low – buzzing from keyboard
Keyboard backlight on, screen backlight on 100% – very little buzzing from keyboard
Keyboard backlight off, screen backlight on high – buzzing from keyboard
Keyboard backlight off, screen backlight on low – some buzzing from keyboard


Off battery usage (mains unplugged):
minimum noise, regardless of screen brightness or keyboard backlight

It seems to me that the power supply is having some effect on the circuits, creating some degree of fizz / crackle in here linked to the light emitting parts of the laptop.

This isn’t a major thing, hell, many electronics make some noise. Indeed, the fact that the fan on this machine is whisper quiet (when it even activates!) means I hear the sound when I otherwise wouldn’t

Anyone with some tech knowledge about to chime in one this? Google tells me this is a known thing with laptops and backlight keyboards

PS Twitter still crashing display drivers in Edge. Grr!

Otherwise, a happy Spectre owner one week in
James

 

Ok, 5th cycle done....Battery Time of 11:30, estimated runtime average is 9:00. This is ROCKING!!!

VERY PLEASED.

 

Hello all. Has anyone had any issue with the evenness of backlighting of the screen? On mine (QHD) it seems brighter on the side of the screen furthest from the hinge, and the inch or so at the edge of the screen is a slightly whiter/bluer white. It's not too noticeable when viewing the screen straight on, but is more so when viewing at a slight angle or in tent or tablet mode, particularly in portrait mode when the gradient is left-right (I like to use portrait for reading while lying on my side). I tried taking some pictures with my camera but they don't seem to come out very well.

The brightness (of whites particularly) also seems very directional. When you're viewing straight on, it's bright, but move your head or tilt the screen a couple of degrees, and it's like a shadow passing over the screen. When web browsing in portrait mode, it's like a 3-D effect since my eyes are seeing different bright areas... is this normal?

I'm thinking of returning the unit, but maybe I'm being overly picky. I'll post my other impressions of the machine in another post...

 

οκ

 

So as of 22nd December,

In regards to my laptop giving off a high pitched “whine” from both the power socket area and the transformer itself when turned on, plugged in and fully charged.

HP Sent me a new charger. Fantastic customer service from UK customer phone line. Straight to a technician! They claim a “whiney” AC transformer is not a known defect. They tried a full reboot of the BIOS over the phone first, which didn’t help, and decided that this was the easiest course. She had even heard of coil whine and listened carefully to my thoughts and google findings.

The new transformer is a slightly different shape. Same voltage, amp and watt rating. And this one is silent. HURRAH! The only noise I get from my laptop now is the fan when it kicks in, and a super faint “ticking” sound at all times, which I think is standard on CPUs. The number of these clicks is dependent on load. Scrolling in Edge or Word, I can hear a super faint ticking. This is at least a non-intrusive noise - the high pitched AC whine, while quiet, was super high pitched and thus super annoying!

Interestingly:

The day before the charger arrived I managed to silence the laptop using my old adaptor!

The trick: in Power Saver setting, I changed minimum CPU load to 25%. My theory – the power saving abilities of Skylake processor (C states, or whatever they are called) mean that the processor goes into a super low voltage/power mode when it is Idle. This means that, when the laptop is plugged in AND the battery charged, the Power supply is providing too much power, which is causing some kind of conflict which creates electrical noise.

(Interestingly, device manager still reports my laptop dropping to 2% when idle… no idea why!)

Madness

This tweak does tally with my thinking that the load on the CPU affects the sound. This explains why no noise off battery. This explains why there is no noise when plugged in but the battery is charging, as the power is actually DOING something.

This is ONLY a workaround. My new charger works on all power settings without tweaking. So something was either broken or badly designed in the old one

Now this noise issue is sorted, My ONLY niggle now with the laptop is the synaptic pad: on roughly 4/5 times the laptop wakes up with three finger swipe motions turned off. Methinks synaptics and/or windows driver issues which will be sorted.

Oh. And display drivers crashing in Edge. But that is very well documented and will be patched. Apparently the Beta drivers are great – I’ll wait for HP to put them out though!

Regardless. I am now super happy with my shiny Spectre.

Hope this wall of info helps someone!

James

 

Still confused why all my windows re-size smaller when I wake up from sleep. Any one know? It is super annoying having to re-adjust all my windows every time.

 

Not sure I follow...do you mean fonts/menus shrink, or the windows themselves?

-Matt

 

It's the nature of glossy displays. The "shadow" is the glare and reflections of other items in the room (usually a wall). On max brightness, this is not an issue, but on lower settings, yes, because higher brightness is needed to mitigate glare. The Spectre's display is almost mirror-like, though for me it's not too much of a bother since I work primarily in a dim room anyway with yellow lamps instead of overhead/ceiling white lights.

 

Not the font. I mean the windows. Like resizing two chrome tabs side by side to be more efficient. When it wakes up from sleep, the windows will be resized to a smaller version of my initial setting. It seems like the laptop automatically readjusts the windows to 150% size? I am unsure what is going on since I never had this problem in other laptops before.

 

Ah, gotcha. I don't think I've seen that before, or heard it mentioned here. FWIW I just gave it a try like you described, but both windows were the way I left them when I woke the laptop up. Not sure if I can reproduce the issue.

-Matt

 

Not reflections - what I'm talking about is shown in this video:

The light is all coming from the screen.

 

Since I did a clean install of W10, my spectre makes a lot of fan noise that is really annoying. In the task manager I can see that Microsoft Edge consumes too much memory and CPU. Just a few tabs open and nothing special running. Any idea what it is about?

 

the black version of this x360...is only the "pro" ?

 

Just got a Ash Silver Skylake i7 version, feels great
I think I have a rattling/buzzing fan though (bad bearing?)... is that something that happens with the Spectre? Guess I'm going to run some CPU intensive stuff to make it spin for a while and hope the noise goes away.
Other than that, FHD screen is very sharp, pad is not rattling, no power circuit beeping sound, no wifi issues, keyboard is nice, touchscreen is nice too.

 

Hi all, I have the new i5 model with win 10 and I've been having weird issue on shutdown and restart. Once logged in, if I shutdown the computer it looks like it shut downs but the power button light stays on and if the lid is open the computer will not complete the operation and will instead by itself restart...has anyone experienced this kind of behavior? Does it look more like and virus of some sort of or an hardware issue?

Thanks for your replies.

 

Now that I've had a few cycles, I am averaging down to about 8 hours of battery time. For an i7/FHD, I am good with that. Hope the battery saving list helps.

BTW, I ditched Chrome and switch to IE11/Edge, but the lack of add-ons, etc has put me into using Firefox64, which seems to be a great middle ground of battery usage between Chrome & IE11.

On the display front, I am using the newest Intel HD520 beta drivers...that has stopped te Driver crashing issue.

Other than that, no issues with my Skylake....at this time.

 

Hi, I just bought a new Spectre x360 13 for my wife but can not find any ICC file for it as she has the FHD version. Can someone kindly guide me here? I know that an ICC from someone else is not perfect but I do not have a screen calibration tool

 

Download the SMBus driver here http://www.synaptics.com/en/drivers.php unzip, find your touchpad device in the Windows Device Manager and update the driver there through pointing to the folder you just unzipped and the x86 or x64 subfolder. That fixed it for me as just installing this new version did not update my driver version somehow. That fixed it for me (I hope)

 

Since I did a clean install of W10, my spectre makes loud fan noise almost all the time. Nothing to do with heavy usage, even when CPU and memory % are very low. I have very few programs and apps, nothing peculiar in the background. Could it be some king of BIOS update I have missed?

 

can the spectre connect to a 5g network?

 

I'm looking to buy an x360 (Skylake version) in the UK but can't seem to find them for sale anywhere but the HP store. Are there any deals or discounts around and is the price on the store (currently £899 for the i5 8GB/256GB FHD model) likely to be cut any time soon (with the new models announced and apparently appearing around March...)?

 

Hey all

I have two quick questions for those more tech savvy than me

(1) The "Display driver stopped working" issue in Edge browser - this can be fixed with the Beta Intel 520 drivers. I would rather avoid beta drivers... will these be distributed to us once out of beta? Do these arrive via windows updates or HP updates? I assume Windows...

(2) The synaptics drivers updates mentioned in post #1185 by rugwarrior above: again, rather than install these, will they be distributed to us once signed off by HP to hopefully stop the intermittent issues with three finger swipes?

Basically, I prefer to get these things "from the source" as I am not great with tech stuff "under the hood". I am happy to deal with the odd page refresh and occasional three-finger issues and wait a few months...

Oddly I have noticed my fan is more active in the last week than it was since I first bought it, again, staying at under 20%.... I wonder if something has been altered under the hood somewhere...

 

Thanks for the heads-up on new models. An OLED display, eh? Sounds fantastic! It would fix issues with directionality of white-brightness, and uneven backlighting. Also would probably fix the "unsteady on a flat surface" problem, since they say the screen is 50g lighter. Will be tempted to trade my current machine in if it's not too expensive.

Re: price cuts, they had a 15% off everything in the HP store "Cyber Monday" sale (Monday after Black Friday, whenever that was), which wasn't long after the release of the Skylake models.

Just before the Skylake models were released they were doing £140 cashback on the old stock, which also applied if you bought from a shop like John Lewis.

With the new models it seems like the only difference is the screen, so whether they're discounting the old ones will depend on whether this is considered a "replacement" for the IPS models, or will sell alongside them. I expect it'll be the latter since the new models only just came out, but I might be wrong. In other words don't hold your breath for discounts, but if you like the idea of an OLED display then it might be worth hanging on till they come out.

 

can anyone list the best spectre deals in canada? 8gig, 256 ssd model?

 

Best I have seen is 15% off from the HP website and $350 off the I7 model from Microsoft. This was between October-Nov 2015. Haven't seen another deal since.

 

thank you for your reply. im looking to buy a new one these days. is there one out now? not necessarily a deal but the best price for performance model?

 

I haven't seen any new deals, but there should be some coming up since a new OLED model was announced at CES. Only a matter a time before they put another sale on

 

I've noticed an issue with the Spectre, and that's having the fan come on everytime I plug in the AC power adapter. It gets really hot near the AC power port too, though I never touch that area so it's not too much of a bother.

Is there any way to reduce the heat from the AC adapter? Maybe a way to reduce the wattage so that the notebook stays cooler? Heat shortens the lifespan of components, after all.

 

what are you doing when this occurs? playing games..etc?

 

This fan issue is very annoying for me, too

 

I'm assuming those with fan issues have been looking at Task Manager (or Resource Monitor) to try and correlate fan use with suspicious app activity. Not sure this will help anyone, but a few weeks ago I started to notice that RuntimeBroker was being very naughty...seems to have started around the time of one of the large Win 10 updates. The discussion here helped educate me a bit:

http://www.tenforums.com/network-sharing/7907-runtime-broker-process.html

-Matt

 

No, just charging with AC. I rarely do anything other than browse the web (on MS Edge currently). And it's only, like, 20 tabs, which isn't that many.

I doubt it's RuntimeBroker, because the fans only come on while it's plugged into AC. On battery it remains very cool and quiet, but on AC, even at idle, the fans spin and the top left corner of the keyboard next to the AC power jack gets burning hot.

 

could it be a defective unit?

 

quick questions is it possible to replace the hp spectre battery? and how much does it cost to buy one?

 

For me: The device does get a bit warmer when charging. But not enough to cause the fan to come on. If the fan comes on it's because the CPU is busy (check task manager).

I recommend Firefox with Adblock installed, and not to install Flash (few sites actually require it these days). CPU usage is around 1%, and half of that is task manager.

Warmer ambient temperature will make the fan come on more too.