HP dv4 intel owners.... notice this?

I am on my 2nd dv4-1280us. I found the problems to be the same with both laptops. Loud laptop fan. Yes I went in and disabled fan always on which is a big help but even on the lowest fan settings its loud when it kicks on. My 6910P and my dell 1505 never get that loud. I can overlook this because its not my laptop is for my g/f who doesnt mind it. Another issue is the sound controls. I have had problems with both laptops. If you try to access the sound to early you can sometimes crash explorer. I manged to do this on two new laptops easily. I even installed my own OS and had the same problems with all the lastest drivers. I tried to disable the button noise in the bios but as soon as you do this the mute button stops working. This happend on both machines. That is my biggest gripe. If any of you notice your speakers make a POP noise on start up. Rollback your HP HD sensor driver. The latest driver makes the laptop speakers POP while vista is booting. I also experienced this on both laptops. It started after the windows updates and 4 new drivers got loaded. I kept rolling them back until I found the one that caused it. Overall its not a bad laptop and the only real issue is the ability to crash explorer if your not careful with the sound bar. Anyone else run into this?

 

My sound bar has never crashed my explorer. My mute button has never worked from day 1, but other than that,the sound bar is okay. I have always wondering if I was supposed to be able to slide my fingers across that bar though. I can only click the + and - as the end of the bar to change the volume. Is this how it is supposed to work?

 

My mute works fine.. and yes you should be able to slide your finger on the sound bar. That works also. I found that if you disable the button noise in the bios the MUTE button will stop working. I think the latest IDT audio driver may fix this issue but I haven't had a chance to try it.

 

Oh wow. Mine is working! I slid my fingers, and my volume changes. I have to put a little more pressure sometimes to get it more accurate, but it works. I only need to get my mute button fixed now.

 

What did you change? Also, does your sound bar make noise when you adjust it? Like a clicking that gets louder to tell you the volume is increasing?

 

I didnt change anything. I guess I just never tried it properly, or maybe it was an update that cause it to start working and I just never re-checked it. Yes, it does make the clicking sound when it gets louder.

 

Have you tried the latest IDT Audio driver? There is a version newer then what HP has listed in their downloads. I believe its version 6.10.6087.22. You may give that a shot. If it doesn't work or does something funny you can just roll back to the last driver.

 

The fan is really loud. I really hate it.
Also, the left palm rest area gets warm in winter and hot in summer.

 

You can go into bios by pressing escape then F10. There is an option that says Fan Always On "Enabled" be default. If you set it to "Disabled" the fan will only kick on when the laptop needs it. They really should have done some better fan control and cooling for these. Just opeing up the grill on the bottom a bit more would help and giving a low fan speed that slowly speeds up as needed instead of the speed settings it has.

 

I recall reading about how the fan refuses to drop down to its lowest speed after waking from sleep, and I believe that this is still the case. It needs a BIOS update to fix.

 

Yes, sometimes mine sticks from multiple reboots. It takes a complete shutdown to fix it. Even then its loud at its lowest speed setting. I have 3 different Dell's beside me right now that are running at a low speed and almost silent while still keeping the system fairly cool.