*HP dv2z Owners Lounge*

You can do the wwan antenna upgrade before the SSD / wwan Card arrive. It's by far the hardest of the 3, you have to disassemble the entire DV2 including keyboard and screen. The antenna cables go round the inside of the screen, so just route them to the WWAN container ready for when the card arrives.

ps My wwan card never came with any screws to attach it, I used one of the screws from the wifi card

pps Works great when finished, have used it in about 10 different countries so far. All you have to do is pick up a local sim card (often free) and pop it in. Gobi does the rest.

 

I play many games on my DV2 - Mostly RTS and simulations - These run without a glitch. For example C&C series, Age of Empire series.
Racing and FPS games are my secondary choice. These games run nice, but I usually turn off AA and things like shadow detail I set to low.

I just recently installed an Intel SSD X25M-G2 - It gave the DV2 an immense lift in "snappiness" - Not only load times improved.

 

Hi, so i ordered a HP DV2 for a bargain price, spec:

AMD NEO X2 335
2GB Mem, 320GB HDD
12.1"
ATI HD 3410 512.... all for like $499 or less...


NOW i had been reading lots of great reviews... apart from low battery life, but thas not a big issue..

the order has been dispatched, so cant cancel now..

but i now read that ATI HD 3xxx cannot do FLash 10.1 acceleration? cant do H264 1080p?!

i took it for granted that if some really aged Nvidia 8200 chip can do FLash 10.. then a discreet ati known for multimedia AVIVO technology would EASILY be able to do flash 10.1 acceleration?!

now im feeling like i have made a big mistake - was going to order the Asus 1201n ION but wanted the Neo chip not the atom cos the atom sucks

but now im thinking because ATi has gimped the 3410 maybe i should have gotten the asus?!

can anyone help? does flash now work, or is there a hack or workaround? im devastated ive been looking at netbooks for about 6 months.. waiting for ION, then waiting for Neo x2... now ive stuck my money down and think i may have bought badly

please advise!

edit i just read flash 10.1 beta 3 even gives hardware acceleration to GMA 500?! i mean seriously how can an ATi product with 512mb ram and AVD not do what the reknown crappy intel chipset can muster?! HELP

 

Indeed, I had already completely disassembled the laptop. My technician nature forces me to strip and re-assemble. Aside from that, I did all of the upgrades at the same time, I had a flood of parts and pieces arrive all at the same time last friday.

I have a buttload of old laptops no longer in use sitting on the shelves in my lab. I just scoffed a pair of screws from a Toshiba Satellite. The bluetooth module came with a couple screws.

Nada here. I don't do much international travel at all. I installed the HP Wireless Assistant and HP Connection Manager 3.0. They see the Qualcomm Gobi 1000 and recognize my SIM, however, the HP Connection Manager supports AT&T + Verizon (There is built in FW images for about 10 other telco's however nothing for the carrier I am using which is TELUS in Western Canada). Of course trying to hook up to any of the providers in the connection manager fails, and even though it sees an HSPA signal when it fails it gives me an option to scan for an "Other Network". But fails to make a connection. The SIM I am using comes from a TELUS USB Aircard (Sierra Wireless USB 306 but this shouldn't matter, the SIM is from TELUS)

Are you using a 3rd Party Connection Manager perhaps?

 

I just got my 80GB X-25M G2. I am trying 'Partition Wizard boot CD' as I type to copy the mechanical drive to the SSD. Hopefully it should be done in a few minutes and I can test the results.

 

Nice deal on your laptop, Mine cost me $700ish delivered just a month and a half ago and I had import it from Australia e-bay to Canada. Where did you manage to find your deal?

As far as the Flash support, I think the ATI Mobility Catalyst 10.3 due in march will hopefully take care of it. But I am also curious where it is that your read that it couldn't handle h.264 1080P?

 

hi i bought from saveonlaptops.co.uk its £329 UK prices free delivery. its due to be delivered tomorrow but noones going to be in to recieve it so i can still wait a day to decide if i want to refuse delivery and get money back or not.

i would have bought an acer ferrari one had it sported a hdmi port. i want to be able to watch hi def content (MKV or whatever 720p+) via hdmi on my 40" 1080p samsung lcd. i currently have a USB DVD player that i can watch basic divx and avi etc but it cant do mkv and i can no longer be bothered to re encode things or watch them in inferior resolution when the hi def stuff is out there.

i read about h264 l5.1 high bit rate problems:

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=106911&enterthread=y

lots of messing about with codecs and what not to try and make it work but because the 3xxx series only has avd not avd 2 or whatever it is!


http://zachsaw.blogspot.com/2009/08/watching-hd-video-in-mpc-hc-dxva-for.html

"This is only for ATI card owners with UVD 2 (or newer) though. HD3000 series owners, you guys are out of luck unfortunately (you have AMD / ATI to thank)."

 

Hmmn, nope I use the HP connection manager. In Aus, they don't even offer the wwan module, but it works with all the providers here too. I did have to lookup the internet for the APN for a couple of the providers though. Are you sure you have the correct APN for TELUS ? Maybe that SIM is somehow locked to your USB modem ?

 

I`ll join the club, just recently picked up a DV2 1115ee, got a smokin deal off a local dealer, one of the last few in stock with a bad drive; pulled the 320Gb junked it, replaced it with a Seagate 640Gb, all for the cost of a decent Netbook Clean instal of Windows 7 Home Premium sorted out the OS, runs smooth & fast.

DV2 can playback 1080p MKV`s no problem, just download MPC-HC and you are good to go with DVXA, no changes to the system codecs. So far all the 1080p MKV`s I have tried have been spot on, 720p is a cakewalk, DVXA keeps the CPU utilization right down.

So far battery life and temperature have not been an issue and if it does, under volting, will be the way ahead. Performance wise the Neo X2 (Athlon L335) is good enough for my needs.

Only real criticism 2Gb RAM, not 4Gb, then again a DV2 with external drive for a little more than the cost of a HP Mini 210, and that includes the Seagate drive , I just can`t complain at all

DV2 1115ee AMD Athlon Neo x2 Dual Core L335
ATI Mobility Radeon HD3410
2Gb RAM (stock) 640GB Seagate HDD (Stock Seagate 320GB)
Win7 x32 (Stock Win Vista 32)

System was originally for Saudi Arabia, I picked the DV2 up in the State of Qatar, hence the dealers super low price. for him it was just dead stock with a difficult return path...

 

For those with HD playback problems

The KMPlayer" (KMP) it will play MKV`s that the like`s of VLC wont touch (slideshow), with it`s own binary codecs the video is decoded solely by the CPU. KMP can run with external decoders like CoreAVC, which is presently the fastest SW decoding solution (good news for single cores) KMP has a vast array of options and settings and does take some understanding to get the best out of, however the picture quality is outstanding and it will play many files that other media players wont open or refuse to play.

By tuning the player you can literally get picture perfect playback, the problem with single core CPU`s is that they can be overloaded fairly easily, so it is best change the settings one at a time and see the result.

For better picture quality: F2 Preferences
For Neo or Atom etc; General, Work Priority set to High, this will help reduce stuttering.

Video Processing;
Change the renderer from Overlay Mixer (Default) to either VMR9 Renderless (HQ Subtitles) or Enhanced Video Renderer (C/A) Latter offering the best quality. the renderers are Microsoft; XP, DX9, and Vista respectively (EVR wont work on XP without NET 3.0 installed)
Post processing check MPlayer, Accurate deblocking, Nic`s, Nic`s first, PP7 Deblocking and Soft Threshold
Sharpen check Asharp (A.=Adaptive) and High quality block filtering
Reduce/Add Noise check Denoise 3D

Subtitle Processing;
I just change the font to Microsoft Sans Serif and size to my liking

The KMPlayer is one of the great secrets of software decoding/video playback, most think of VLC etc KMP can literally work magic allowing you to play media files other players refuse to or are simply unwatchable. DXVA is possible with KMP, however you will need components of MPC HC and several other SW packages. Personally I prefer to have one player for SW decode and a second for DXVA. KMP will not develop DXVA playback at present as is not native to the player. MPC-HC will continue to develop its implementation GPU decoding as it is integral to the player.

For the DV2 really the best solution is to use DXVA utilizing the GPU and significantly reduce CPU/temperature load during decoding/playback.

Media Player Classic - Home Cinema get it here

Look here for a detailed setup guide, and here for detailed explanations.I only have MPC-HC on my DV2 at present with a clean install of Windows 7, I skipped step one (1), so no need to block any other filters, nor did I instal Haali Media Splitter as 7 looks to take care of things. Basically starting from step two (2). There are some files that wont play under DXVA, so far outside of some very stressing test videos, all I have played has been great on the DV2 with MPC-HC

"Splash Player" will also use the GPU automatically for decoding and is by far the simplest set up, this too is in development although it does not offer as many options as the likes of MPC-HC or KMP.

All the above players utilize Binary codec`s and do not interfere or replace the system codec`s. All this said and done I found the picture quality under DXVA to be very good with MPC-HC & EVR, presently decoding purely in SW by the CPU still offers the edge with the best picture quality versa hardware decode using DXVA.

For those having problems with Windows 7 64Bit try Shark`s Codec`s this will fix your problems, just be warned a fair amount of files will be added to your system and the system codecs are changed. It does work, and can be uninstalled via Shark`s own interface. Probably the easiest solution in some respects, just install forget, enjoy.

For those that are really struggling, Netbooks etc, use the KMPLayer and CoreAVC 2.0 as an external decoder this is by far the fastest/lightest solution for H.264 HD software video decoding and you will be able to playback 720P on the Atom CPU.

 

Yeah my DV2 came from Australia it is a DV2-1132AX. I made it Canadian by adding a 4GB SODIMM, an 80GB G2 X-25M last night and upgraded the Broadcomm 802.11g mini-wifi to the 802.11n, added the antennas for the WWAN and obviously added an HP Gobi 1000. Good call on the APN, I just need to figure out where to input the information. Lunch is 3 hours away I'll have a go then. According to Telus the SIM shouldn't be locked to the modem.

 

so you'd definately stick with a DV2z over say, an Asus 1201N? as i say for mostly web browsing, and media playback...the flash HD non HW accel is an annoyance and yes i found splash lite 1.2 last night it seems okay - but obviously not had chance to test as i dont have my 2z yet

 

You know that's a tough call actually. If you open the DV2 and are unhappy with the performance can you return it?

dual core atom vs neo x2 slight edge to the Neo x2 performance wise, but offset by the atom's power consumption.

I think the 9400 Ion graphics may have a slight edge, especially considering the HW flash acceleration is guaranteed for the nVidia platform and the 3400 series discrete ATI graphics seem to be forgotten by AMD/ATI as well as OEM's (HP really, did Toshiba ever offer the 34xx with it's Neo's?). Nothing is guaranteed although I have my fingers crossed that the 10.3 cats will finally support the 34xx series.

I think the winner for the Asus is the 1366x768 display. The 1280x800 on the dv2 is really clear, bright etc, although in this form factor I question the use of the panel as such and personally would have preferred 1366x768.

Last is the multi-touch support on the ASUS trackpad.

Having said all this in ASUS favor, I'm more than happy with my purchase I am after all an HP Junkie...

 

yea thanks for the input - no once i open it i cant return it so i cant even take a play on it first to see.:/

yea i read the reviews the HP screen is almost double the brightness etc of the asus...

and yep, Neo>Atom but 9400>ATi

asus comes with win 7 - hp with Vista so added cost to get win7 installed if i want it.

Tosh did 34xx series (mainly 3470's) with some of their noteboks but not in huge quantities - unlike HP. but having said that i mean its the entire of the 3000 series, and there are a LOT of acer 3650's floating around out there... at the time i got my mate to buy a nv 9500gs mobility gfx chip instead of an ati 2600xt which i am now glad about!

thing that annoys me is that Ati have done hardware flash and decosing on the IPG 3200HD.. and how can the 3200IPG be as powerful, or as capable as the 34xx series anyway?

but because its still a current product (i.e sold in acer ferrari, dm3, plus lots of others) somehow it magically has ability to do decoding and is included in the flash HD acceleration list?! i mean come on ATi!

 

Ahh thank you eff_cee that did indeed correct the problem. Bye bye dongle! It worked great!

 

I've used MPC-HC for a couple years now and agree it is first rate.

 

well there was noone in to accept or reject delivery.. so they left it with my neighbour who is now out! so i have the dv2 but i dont have it in my hands just yet:/

think ill keep it and give it a whirl if things dont go well i can always try to ebay it off or something. ive got splash 1.2 and also mpc-hc so ill test it and see what it can do.

 

OK here's the deal with the flash 10.1 hardware acceleration thing-truth be told I think it is unlikely that it will ever come to the 3000 series, for the following reasons:

-When it was first announced by ATI in the Catalyst 9.11 release, it was stated that it would be for the 4000 series and up.

-I have the leaked Catalyst 10.3 driver installed which is supposed to be the first to fully support laptop GPUs, along with the Flash 10.3 beta 3(with the "Enable Hardware Acceleration" checkbox checked) which came out yesterday, and I'm still noticing the same stuttering on 720p and 1080p that I got when I first got the laptop.

-These new drivers do let me play games fullscreen again(Yay, Nvidia style!), which is something I could not do with ANY of the previous drivers, which shows that they do fully support the 3410 card itself but they don't let me stream HD flash so that tells me it's a problem with Flash support.

However, I do think that the hardware even on the single core Athlon Neo version is fully capable of streaming HD Flash because the 3410 does support h.246 decoding.

 

Any possibility of sharing the 10.3 d/l url?

 

All good google-fu works.

 

has anyone tried fitting a broadcom crystal hd mini card? this could fix the problems with flash/hd streaming tbh but im wondering do we have a spare port in the dv2z to install this without having to remove the installed wifi card?

 

YEah yu have a full height mini-pcie slot right beside the memory slot. Whether or not the Phoenix BIOS will play nicely with it is another question entirely.

 

heh interesting... i might just keep the dv2 then. broadcom card for flash/hulu hd stuff...ati for dedicated gaming.... ive read that ION2 may come out as a standalone add in PCIE card too... can u imagine radeon 3410 and nvidia ion 2 in the same netbook? sure things would get awful toasty and battery life would die but it would be sweet. also wondering how removable the 3410 is and could it ever be swapped for a 4330 or similar? or is that a total no go? (i.e if the 3410 soldered in? or mxm-2 or something...)

 

All in one solution. Here is a link for the service manual:

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01682742.pdf

 

well ive cracked itopen seems okay so far. on off buttom switch seems a bit flimsy but nm. rmclockd it to downvolt, installed catalyst 10.3beta and tested some youtube 720p and 1080p vids. 720p seems fine but 1080 seems to be maybe dropping some frames.

im wondering if i throw in another 2gb of memory will it give e dual channel -maybe this will help in some situations?

just ownloading manual and adobe reader now. thanks.

 

okay - so i opened up the dv2 and it only has 1 memory slot.. in total... dual channel memory ruled out

 

Wow you have 720p working? Amazing, do you have the dual core version? I can't get 720p youtube working on my single core no matter what so far and I think I have the same settings you have?

 

hi yes i have the x2 neo 335 chip in mine and it runs fine even overwireless using the stock b/g card. 1080p worked okay too but it was probably dropping a rame or two.

thass with other windows open etc i was using ie not firefox running win 7 hp 64bit.

mine is the dv2 1211ea model.

 

Yeah I had no problem with 720p vids with the OEM Cats from HP. I updated to the 10.3 leaker this weekend and had all sorts of stuttering problems goin on. I attributed it to my completely sucky home ADSL. Switched on my internal WWAN and it improved it a littel bit but even 480 vids were stuttering like crazy. There was plenty of dl'ed video in the buffer too. Was rather frustrating. If I get some time this week I'm going to roll back to the HP OEM's and try again.

 

I am also on the OEM Cats with no problems, have you looked at system latency?

Try this site and the Latency Checker - DPC Latency Checker is a Windows tool that analyses the capabilities of a computer system to handle real-time data streams properly. It may help to find the cause for interruptions in real-time audio and video streams.



One of the reasons why I went with Windows 7 32 for this reason, as I have seen 64 bit systems with significant latency. you can use the tool to help determine the causes, WIFI, AV etc

DV2 1115ee, Neo X2 335 CPU, 2Gb Ram, 640Gb HDD, Windows 7 (HP), HP updates, MPC-HC for video (no other codecs)

 

Interesting I'll check this out tonight.

 

DPC Latency Checker will definitely help you track down any latency in the system just need to turn things off one by one (HW & SW), pretty useful tool for these problems. You could be conceivably be changing codecs and players that are perfectly good, and the root cause remain buried.

 

I have noticed the 3410 video card in my DV2 has two clock settings:
On battery with powerplay enabled: GPU 148 MHz / Memory 198 Mhz.
Without powerplay enabled or plugged in:GPU 222 MHz / Memory 247 Mhz.

However with Vista 32bit and ATi driver version 10.2, I was able to overclock both the GPU and the video ram to 351MHz / 333MHz. Any more than this is asking for trouble, but otherwise stable at these speeds. If overheating concerns you, then just overclock only the memory, there is are huge gains to be had here.

Right now I want to modifiy the video bios. If anyone knows how I can save the bios to file, please post. I have already tried, gpuz, winflash, atiflash, everest, and various other tools in an attempt to extract then mod the bios.

Since I have installed Windows 7 ultimate 64bit, overclocking no longer works. ATI drivers e.g. 10.2 no longer install, good news is 10.3 beta will install. However overclocking under windows 7 still does not work with any tool I have tried to use, gpu-tool, att, msi afterburner, rivatuner.
There must be a way to unlock overclocking again in windows 7, please shout out if you know.

GPU 222 MHz / Memory 247 Mhz
vs
GPU 351 MHz / Memory 333MHz

The increase in speed is well worth it (I am considering moving back to Vista?)

Update...
Maybe I will not move back to vista. I have found using MSI Afterburner, I can obtain overclocking of the GPU / Memory once again but toggling powerplay off then on again, selecting max performance, it then set clocks without defaulting back to factory Serious Sam HD is as smooth as butter again at 1280 x 800.

Still want to mod the video bios, really want to mess with voltage options. I suspect there is a 1.1v option and a 0.9v option. I want to take to 0.9v option and set stock for slightly above clocks for better battery life without loss of performance (or even a increase).

 

For people trying to do this, you'll need to edit the cfg file in the MSI afterburner's allow unofficial overclocking feature=1 instead of =0. If you want to increase speed beyond the max of the sliders you have to restart the program.

 

T2050, How much RAM do you have in your dv2?

Nice post by the way.

 

EDITED with benchmarks and more info:

K, I just finished testing and I've got my ATI 3410 stable at 351MHz for both clock and 297MHz for VRAM. I start to get artifacts in-game at speeds any higher and any game running will freeze and Windows 7 reports the driver crashed.

58% increase in core speed and 20% increase in VRAM speed(as compared with stock 222MHz/247MHz). Result: going from an average 39fps to average 48fps in Halo CE, a 22% increase in framerate. Cost: Nada. Seems like max performance increases are dependent on VRAM increases.

I'm getting an unconfirmed report from a user named pavel on this page who says that you can achieve a CPU overclock of 1.86GHz on the Athlon Neo, but he doesn't say how. Can anyone else confirm this/provide instructions?

T2050 ATI Tray Tools reports that this laptop does not support voltage changing.

 

Only 2GB, would like 4GB but a single module is way over priced.

Although DDR-800 is not required, the DV2 never even makes it to 667, somewhere around 642.

To increase memory performance and latency, use memset 4.0, it is possible to run 4-4-4-12-T1 no problem at all.

Latency reported with everest can be dropped down from ~70ns standard to ~60ns with tweaking of the sub timings.

 

I'm not sure how much extra performance you'll get out of the RAM since it seems fast enough for me, but I was unable to set the first timing to 4(It would stay at 5 every time I tried to change it)and when I set the rest of them and applied the settings it crashed.

 

See if you can run command rate @ 1T, this should give you a nice boost.

By the way an SSD works nicely in these machines, providing a nice speed bump, apps and everything launch super quick, feels like a real upgrade.

I did have a 250GB HDD as standard. Then I went 64GB SSD, but that was to small for the 1080p movies I like watching on my TV with the HDMI output. In the end I went put in a WD 500GB HDD.

Improvements to the HDD I made:
1. Installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit.
2. Created a pagefile partition at the start of the disk (16512MB), allocate exactly 16GB (16384MB) as the pagefile.
3. Created a partition named dataTemp just after the pagefile partition. This is where any extraction or windows can use to anything is likes. Same size as above.
4. Moved the OS to the remainder of the drive.

The above adjustments were I feel user noticeable without any kind of benching. The theory is, keeping all operations at the fastest part of the disk, reducing fragmentation.

 

My DV2 had a 320Gb, ditched that for a 640GB Seagate with noticeable difference in performance, having just short of 500Gb free after OS & apps on the data partition is not too shabby either for MKV`s etc

 

Queen6 I am considering doing that, did you get the 7200rpm or 5400rpm drive? Is the 7200rpm drive even compatible with the dv2?

 

I just went with the 640Gb, 5400rpm, with such high data density the drive performs superbly. In the real world 7200rpm should have a slight edge, equally there has to be some trade off in battery life, heat and possibly noise.

For my needs the 640Gb @ 5400rpm is plenty fast enough, the speed bump was noticeable, and the capacity is tremendous in such a small platform. I guess if you were dealing with read/writing many very large files the 7200rpm would be better, for more regular use I doubt there would be a serious improvement in speed.

Q-6

 

Thanks for the info. Man, I'm just realizing now how much I love the dv2-I've gotten so used to the small size and netbook-style weight, yet very decent graphics performance of the dv2, it's awesome being able to have an ultraportable this capable at such an affordable price that can play Halo 2 at an average of 40+fps. I still can't believe I'm using this as my main machine and feeling very satisfied. No wonder notebookreview gave it an editor's choice award.

 

I agree, mind you I kind of went OCD with my dv2, I bought a neox2 w/3410 off ebay. Once I had it I realized there were several upgrades I could do to it so I ordered a mini 802.11n card, the gobi 1000 wwan card+antenna set, a bluetooth module and a g2 80GB intel x-25m. Frickin thing is amazing. the gobi card and antenna cost a couple hundred but the portability with an hspa connection is the best thing I did. I found a 1/2 price deal on a new HP USB tv-tuner, with antenna too, nice to be able to set up pretty much anywhere I go, mobile entertainment the 3G connection works perfectly with the MediaSmart server I have set up at home. and everything fits into a backpack with ease so portability is no issue.

 

So since we are eol with our DV2's is driver support all but gone too? No BIOS updates either?

 

Does anyone know if it is possible to use the extra mini pci-e slot for a mini pci-e ssd? I have search extensively and can't find out much information at all. I know that the pata mini pci-e cards don't work. If anyone has a pinout for that slot it would great. I would love to be able to boot the OS from an internal SSD, but still have the other drive for data storage.

 

That extra pci-e slot was intended for a GOBI 1000 wwan card. I bought an antenna kit and card off e-bay, it works perfect.

The problem with mini-pcie ssd's are that they all rely on having a built in controller passed through the mini pci-e slot. None that are commercially available have a built-in pata or sata controller, the netbooks they are built for have the pin connections passed to onboard controllers. The extra mini pci-e slot in the DV2 does not.

Samsung announced last year that they had some mini pci-e ssd's with a built in controller and wicked fast read/writes but I just checked a couple weeks ago and still see no availability.

 

I'm still getting the wireless issue with HP laptops where the wireless takes FOREVER to connect(The other win7 laptops in my house get the signal almost immediately) and CPU stays at 100% until connected, it's ultra annoying.

 

My DV2 has been good so far, fairing no worse or better than any of the other notebooks in the house; Acer Samsung, Mac, & Dell. DV2 acquires signal fast and doesn't have any problems with dropping or loss.

I would like to spend some time and "undervolt" the CPU, although with the latest BIOS, it`s not too bad, I reckon the GPU is the real culprit. Must admit so far it has played anything thrown at it with MPC-HC, works a treat with a LG HS-201G LED Ultra Portable Projector 100 inch screen has to be seen , the HS-201G make the ideal travelling companion to the DV2 just waiting on reasonably priced 720p and then 1080p LED projectors in a year or three

 

I had the 802.11g mini-wifi card in mine when I bought it. The 802.11n part was $20 bucks on e-bay so I picked it up too. Both connect immediately as I log in. With the SSD I timed it and I'm about 20 seconds from a cold boot to navigating here and replying to this thread.