*HP dv8 Owners Lounge*

Thanks so much for your response. You are right about the hdx16. I am using both vegas 9 and premiere pro 8 and the mts files are really shaky and tough to manage. I am glad that with this laptop it is much better. Question, I have the blu-ray buner in my hdx16, is it compatible with the dv8t? I hate to buy another one if I can move this one over. As for memory I will probably get 6 or 8 meg. which should be plenty. Thanks again.

 

I didn't see where you mentioned the version of Windows 7 you're using. If you use 32 bit, you may want to have a look at this 'Physical Memory Limits' link before spending the extra $ for more than 4 GB ram:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7

RT

 

HELP!!!
I have searched the internet for a solution to my problem and found this forum that seems to have smart people on it. Issue;
I have a HP pavilion media center ed DV8135nr turion 64 mobile 2 ghz, 1 gb ram, 100 gbhdd that was built in 2005 running xp home edition. i just bought a 8gb itouch 3g and am having issues when i plug it into the laptop. it seems to work for a minute but then the itouch reads synching and then the whole laptop shuts off with no error message or warning. when i boot back up it is fine. i tried calling hp but they wont talk with me unless i purchase a new warranty. this laptop was a hand me down from inlaws and i have loved it thus far, just cant play with my new itouch with it.
i have hooked the itouch up to another computer to check to make sure its not the itouch and its not.
I have the laptop on a fan platform so i don't think its a heat issue since it doesnt feel all that warm to me when it shuts off.
Can someone please help.

If there is any information that you need that i am not including, please let me know.

 

have you updated all the drivers?

 

i have went to the hp support site and have checked that i have the latest drivers. i see that i dont have the service pk 2 for winxp but the others look up to date. what specifically am i looking for on the drivers page to see what i need to update?

 

A lot of programs state they require 'XP sp2 or above', and won't run (or won't run correctly) unless sp2 is installed. I'd consider it a "must have". In addition, there also is a sp3 for XP.

RT

 

Looking for some information guys, hope you can help!

1. I like the look of this laptop however, CES is round the corner. Are HP likely to supersede this soon?
2. I read horrible things about the hinge not closing. Are these people unlucky or are all like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUuB99xpjfw and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdJMhYRSwL8&feature=related
3. What parts are upgradeable without voiding warranty?

 

I believe you are posting your question in the wrong forum. Please post your problem in your corresponding Owners Lounge or in the root of the HP forum

 

I am using windows 7 64 bit, so I shouldn't have a problem. Thanks.

 

One other question for you. How about the build quality of the dv8t vs. the hdx16? I know it compares more to the hdx18 but is one a better built machine?

 

Well I've used the HDX 16t and now have the dv8t and IMHO build quality is exactly the same. I still prefer the hdx design over the espresso design but I have no complaints.

 

Hi there - new to this thread. Just bought a HP DV8 1080ea in Europe.
2x320GB, 4GB, Nvidia 230M, i7 720, 1080p, etc.
Really happy with it - eSATA works well etc.
So far the video driver failed twice under v186 so I forced it to upgrade to v195, using the helpful info on this thread - thanks for that. So far no problems.

Does anyone know what the megapixels on the webcam is? All the HP specs don't say.

Also why does searching for 'webcam' on this thread show no hits in 157 pages and yet there it is clearly on page 1. Doesn't make sense.

In answer to others' questions - I too have a floppy numerical pad.
And I too manually uninstalled all the crapware - took several hours to do it.

 

Bruddah Jim!

To be honest, the hdx16 build quality is better. Felt more solid. Maybe I was too used to the HDX16. The price I paid for the dv8 I cannot complain. Another note: my couple years old HDX Dragon (20.1in behemoth) hands down has the best build quality out of everything I bought from HP. Too bad that ones an antique now. My dream laptop would be a new generation of HDX 20inch laptops with quadcore and backlit keyboards.

Go back in this thread and browse the complaints and compliments. You'll find that although this is by far not a perfect laptop, it is pretty darn close especially at its price.

Jim, one more thing I want to add. I don't know what operating system you have on your HDX16 but I want to share a quick story with you. It may or may not apply to you. I am bringing it up since you're a fellow HD enthusiast.

I have a Sony HC1 HD camcorder that I love dearly. The picture quality is wonderful. Its a Mini DV tape one but still it works well. Anyway, so I get this DV8t with Win7 64 bit. I load up Vegas Pro and try to capture. No dice. It would recognize the camcorder via the in-program cap utility but would not capture at all via firewire. I browsed the web and found that with Win7, it would use its new firewire driver and for some reason there was a lot of problems especially for those capturing video. One solution which worked for a lot of people, was to go into the driver section of the firewire card and change the driver to the 'legacy' driver. Unfortunately for me it did not work. I'm guessing maybe its because my camera is a 1st gen Sony HD and according to a Microsoft compatibilty site it was not compatible to any Windows 7 64 bit computer. It also said it wouldn't work for Vista 64 either but oddly it worked because I HAD V64 on my Dragon and HDX16.

To make a long story short, I still couldn't capture. It pissed me off. Luckily I have a generous wife who was looking over my shoulder before Xmas as I was researching flash memory HD cams and said 'You want that one?'. Yes! So now transfer is a snap. I just use the Sony utility to get the m2ts off the cam and its already in raw so that I can plop them into my Vegas.

Aloha

 

I loaded up the webcam and the software said best quality was 640x480. .3?

 

Shame on you! Antique...sheesh! Equip it right (look at my sig for my HDX Dragon specs) and that baby is plenty fast! Sure, it's no Core i7, but then again, neither are 99.9% of all notebooks in use! Are you saying that anything that isn't an i7 is an antique?

I do agree, though, that the Dragon is the best built and designed notebook I've had the pleasure to work with (and I've used them all!!). Cool, quiet, and just plain great. I've even started using mine more!!

But, I digress, and this is a dv8t forum...

 

lancorp, how to do you like the DV8t? Says in your sig you haven't opened it yet?

 

I meant antique in MY house. Hehe. Shame on me. My Dragon is nowhere close to your specs as your sig shows. Its a bad mofo. Its just the oldest computer in the house. THATS what I meant.

 

Hey All,

Had my DV8T for about 2 weeks now, and it is awesome. Huge and lighter than my previous Laptop which was a first gen Windows Media Center Laptop. 11 lbs of computer and it was only 15.4 inch. I think it is a little lighter than that one. Glad I bought it on Cyber Monday and got me a HP mini 311, for a total of $1400 with a $500 discount. Not bad for 2 computers. Love them both. Kept the 18in at home while the 11.5 is my travel companion.

Not much for problems so far, but I wish they did have the backlit keyboard, make it so much easier to work in the dark. Good thing is that I got the warrenty with ADP so if it does come out in the future, the DV8T will have an accident so I can get it replaced. Gotta love ADP.

The only thing I notice is that it doesn't sit to well on a laptop cooler with out its battery so I have to leave the battery in the computer which may or may not be good.

Thanks for everyone who talked about the bios problem which is why I will wait to update it. Anyone know anyway to overclock the processor with out causing it to overheat? Want to see if I can get it to be equal to the 820.


My comp Spec.
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
• Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-720QM Processor (1.6GHz, 6MB L2 Cache, 1333MHz FSB)
• FREE Upgrade to 4GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm) from 3GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
• FREE Upgrade to 320GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive with HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
• 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 230M
• 18.4" diagonal High Definition HP Ultra BrightView Infinity Display (1920x1080p)
• Lightscribe Blu-Ray ROM with SuperMulti DVD+/-R/RW Double Layer
• Webcam + Fingerprint Reader with HP Imprint Finish (Espresso Black)
• Intel Wireless-N Mini-card with Bluetooth
• No TV Tuner w/remote control
• HP Color Matching Keyboard
• HP Long Life Notebook Battery

 

Hi, Another DV8 1080EA owner here.. Great laptop, but I also have the bouncy keypad... Mine "Bounces" when I tap the Return Key or either of the delete keys.. Is this the same as the others?

 

Its fine to do, Li-ion batteries dont suffer from charge memory.

 

My keyboard also bounce. I think that is how it is as I read many people have this problem on this forum. There gotta be a way to stop it from bouncing. Thank for the info on the battery.

 

.. as I am happy with the rest of the laptop, I guess it's not worth returning it for this issue, as reading the rest of the comments, odds state I would end up with the same issue again anyway.

 

What dv8t?

 

Thanks for the great information. I can symphathize with your story. I had a canon mini dv and canon hdv video and had the same type of problems with the hdx 16 running vista 64 using sony vegas 9. I never figured it out and had to go to another computer to do this. Anyway, thanks for the info.

 

lol.... what happened to the dv8t in your signature? It was there last night =D

 

I have not found any hits using "thread search" for any search term. I don't think that feature is working.

In particular I am looking for solutions to screen freezes when playing Hulu Flash videos in full screen mode. The picture stops but the stream keeps playing, with sound going on normally. Usually dropping out of full-screen then restarting it temporarily fixes the problem, with no stream interruption. but 5 or 10 minutes later it is back. A quick google search shows this is a common problem and the usual recommendation is turn off Flash hardware acceleration. I don't like that as a solution.

On the NVidia website they have a beta 195 version that works with a beta Flash 10.1 release for direct GPU Flash support. The reason I haven't tried that is, I have seen several posts here that installing native NVidia drivers (rather than HP versions) disables Blu-ray playback on the DV8T. I don't have a need for that feature right now but I don't want to screw it up, just in case.

Unfortunately the latest video drivers available via HP are the same 8.15.11.8644 builds that came with my system.

Have you tested Blu-ray playback since installing 195?

 

I have dv8t and a dv7 with AMD dual-core. About the only thing I don't like about the dv7 is the display is very sensitive to vertical viewing angle. For either video watching or regular computer work, I have to carefully adjust the display hinge angle then sit in the right position, otherwise brightness & contrast fall off noticebly at the top or bottom.

The dv8t does not have this problem, it looks good from any reasonable angle. However I don't remember if there were extra-cost display options that I could have ordered with the dv7 - that might have made a difference.

 

It works, but I don't use HP software e.g. media smart, I use third party software like MPC-HC 64, PowerDVD, Roxio, etc

 

Did you return it? Why?

 

Love this laptop. I did a fresh install of my Windows 7 by following directions found here and it is considerably faster on boot and in general.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=432564

My main reasons were for speed and to seperate my OS partition from my data and to rid all the HP crap. Everything is working well except these two things. I did reinstall all my drivers properly I believe.

1. What drivers/software do I need from HP so that when I use the touch volume and treble/bass slider it actually shows on the screen. I got them to work but they don't show on the screen like they did before I did a clean install.

2. I'm having the issues with the HP Nvidia drivers failing, screen blacking out and then being restored, everything works fine after restoration but it can be kinda annoying. Have you guys had any luck fixing this with the new driver?

I also read that is is quite possible to add another hard drive to this laptop by buying some sort of chassis and of course a hard drive. Anyone care to share a link on the "How To"?

 

A lot of people have the same treble/bass issue as you and no one has found a fix except for the HP tone utility software. The only problem with that is that it cuts the treble/bass bars in half.

With the Nvidia issue, I forced an upgrade to 195 driver but realized the Nvidia control panel would not open so I rolled back the driver to the oldest version possible (v8.17.11.9562) and so far no problems or crashes. I think rather than forcing a driver upgrade you should roll back your current default driver and wait until HP releases a proper driver update.

 

I just got my dv8.... and it DAMN SUCKS.
My the keyboard built into the laptop doesn't even work.
Anyone have any ideas?
I am quite sure Windows detects it, as it is displayed in Device Manager. However, it does not do anything when pressed.

 

Can anyone tell me if the blu-ray RW in my hdx16 will fit in the dv8t?

Jim

 

Thanks for replying.

When I run dxdiag from start menu it says I'm using (v8.15.11.8644) which is what I downloaded from the HP website. I have the Geforce GT 230M. Where could I get your version from and will it work with my setup?

I know my volume touch slider works because when I open Windows speaker icon in Notifications it'll move as I slide, but how would you check the treble and bass sliders?

 

Can anyone help me out, I've searched on here can't seem to find it. The fix for when the you put the pc into standby and upon waking the fingerprint driver is not detected.

 

I've had mine for a few weeks and never noticed until I saw your most, but mine does flex a little bit. Can't feel it, but if I look very close I can see a little flex. I'm not sweating it at all. I've been very happy with it so far. The only thing I'd like to see resolved in the fingerprint reader bug where is isn't found after coming out of sleep mode. For some reason even that is behaving a little better the past few days.

 

I supposedly found a fix. Download the latest version of Digital Persona from this site. I tested it and prior to me installing this the reader was not detected after the computer put itself to sleep, now it is.

http://go.notebookreview.com/?id=525X832&url=http://d11tvxmfjhi64o.cloudfront.net/X64/Setup.exe

 

I had these errors too. So bad on the HDX18T that I had to return it for repair and also on the DV8 until I upgraded the drivers to v195.

Do you watch a lot of 1080p movies? I do - and I run multiple monitors with a website on the other monitor with flash, etc. So the graphics card does get used. Aero is on too.

I think it's heat related - try to keep it cool. On the HDX18T, it eventually failed altogether due to that graphics driver failure.

 

Yeah mine did the black screen once and that told me to update the drivers however I can't. I tried downloading the latest version and after trying to do this setup still failed.

After you have downloaded the driver for your system Driver for x64 you will need to run it (the installation will more than likely fail at this point) but will have extracted the files to the following folder:

C:\NVIDIA\DisplayDriver\195.55\WinVista_Win7_64\International

In this folder you will see a file named nvam.inf. You will need to open this file in notepad and locate these two entries:

%NVIDIA_DEV.0A28.01% = Section065, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0A28&SUBSYS_20311043

%NVIDIA_DEV.0A28.01% = Section066, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0A28&SUBSYS_20311043

You will need to put the entry - 7001103C in where the 20311043 is in both entrys and save the file.

(example: %NVIDIA_DEV.0A28.01% = Section066, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0A28&SUBSYS_7001103C)

From there run the setup file located in this folder and all should install fine. Hope this helps the ones having issues with their video drivers.

 

Yes - I followed these instructions and they worked for the DV8 with the 230 card. Thanks. So far, no black screens.

However upgrading to the v195 drivers didn't work for the HDX18T with the 9600GT card. The black screens (failure and recover) were worse than ever and there were artefacts and constant BSODs. Had to return for a warranty repair.

 

Thank's for all the feedback about the keyboard flex.I'm not concerned about it now and I beleive HP when they say its part of the design because of the extra length of the keyboard. I wish Tech support would of told me that the first time I called them instead of having me send it back for an exchange. As was posted earlier there is an update for the fingerprint reader which I just recievd in my HP auto updates. Hopefully that will help everyone.
I hope everyone who did a bios update have got there fan problems worked out.I didn't update my bios because of the heads up.If you don't have an Iphone with the sync problems you might want to hold off on bios updates. My fans hardly ever run and are quite when they do. I haven't had any problems with the treble/bass controls yet.
Still Loving this laptop! .
The input on this Lounge has been very helpfull for me

 

I followed them step by step and I couldn't get them to work for the Dv8.

Which driver did you download?

 

195.62 worked fine for my dv8......

 

Can you let me know if your flex is also around the home, end and small delete key as well as the numbers on the keypad..?.

 

I got it. thanks

 

Hi There,

Can someone tell me what is the max read speed of the blu-ray drive as well as the max write on the Blu-ray R/RW found in the DV8t quad please?

Regards

 

What software will the built in web cam in the DV8 work with?

 

so loving the new machine so far. anyone having a weird problem where sound themes revert back to the previous setting when you restart/power off.

and yes, i did hit apply.

 

You may want to try using Google.

EXAMPLE:

"OFFICIAL: HP dv8 Owners Lounge" and "webcam" site:http://forum.notebookreview.com/

This will display only postings on this site which contain both items. Most all results will be for "webcam" in this thread. If you want to 'fine tune' it, add AND "fingerprint reader" after "webcam".

Use quotes.

Hope this helps.
RT

 

Thanks. Now I realise the 'search this thread' is not working.