*HP dv8 Owners Lounge*

You can do a fresh install without having to buy another win7 license or disk. Just download the correct version and use the windows key that is on the bottom of the laptop. That's what I did.

 

One can download the official Windows 7 ISO from Digital River:

32-bit Windows 7 Home Premium x86 ISO

Digital River: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65732/X15-65732.iso

64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium x64 ISO

Digital River: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65733/X15-65733.iso

32-bit Windows 7 Professional x86 ISO

Digital River: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65804/X15-65804.iso

64-bit Windows 7 Professional x64 ISO

Digital River: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65805/X15-65805.iso

 

G'day all,
So I'm ready to shell out for my SSD....it'll be 128Gig as per previous discussion.
Just wanted to run the implementation plan by you guys to make sure I've got it straight.
Plan is to hook up the SSD via eSATA external HDD dock, then clone the current primary using Acronis.
Current primary is 320Gig, so I plan to use the manual cloning option which will allow me to modify partition sizes - I guess I'll keep recovery and the other two HP partitions the same size as current, and suck up the 200Gig shortfall out of the OS partition.
Then I swap out the drives and I'm done?

Thanks,
Simon.

 

Sounds good to me. Acronis and manual cloning method is the way I would do it under the same circumstances. I just cloned my OS drive to a mechanical drive in an Esata hard drive dock last night and swapped it in and it worked flawlessly and took about 20 minutes. Yours will go even faster.

If space is tight, you might be able to move the recovery partition to the other (mechanical drive). Another thing to consider is that if you have burned the recovery disks and you make regular backups of your system drives/partitions, you don't even really need the recovery partition. In the event of a problem, you would be better off restoring your configuration from your own backup than by recovering the original factory load with the recovery partition. With the burned disks (assuming they are verified good), you still have the option of booting into the recovery environment if for some reason you would need it. Just something to consider. If you have plenty of space on your SSD for your stuff, you could keep the recovery partition there for now and only move or nuke it if/when you really need some additional space on the SSD.

 

Thanks Peter,
Yes I hadn't thought of that. I have the recovery disks, and regular backups so it sounds like the way forward. I also don't have a plan for the 320G mechanical I'll take out so that could also be swapped back in in an emergency, or I suppose I could access the revovery partition from that drive in the eSATA dock. Cool.
I'll let you guys know how I go.

Thanks again,
Simon.

 

I find it more complex and harder to navigate so far. It's definitely more sophisticated and so it takes longer to figure out how to use. Nice program, tho. VLC is more "Fisher Price" and KM is more like "Prada"...

Regards,
- - Phil

 

I agree with the characterization of the keyboard. i would prefer a bit of feedback, tactile, action but it's a bit muchy but quite comfortable and reliable to use.

Regards.
- - Phil

 

windstrings, you are awesome! That worked great now my volume/bass and other buttons work.

 

I recommend the A-B-C system. To wit, I label three drives A-B- C with sticky labels and at a fixed regular interval, perform a Ghost or Acronis, depending on my machine, sector by sector clone of my operating HDD or SSD to A in my SATA drive dock, then a week later to B, and on the second week to C, and rotate to A on the third week, etc., etc. With each destination drive in my eSATA drive dock, it's very easy to hookup and swap drives, etc, Each takes about 20-25 minutes, depending one how much you have on C: partition. I copy all four partitions each time so the resulting clones are drop in swappable in five minutes. Been doing it that way for 20 years and it really works well.

Regards,
- - Phil

 

I used to do it more or less like that. Now I do a combination of that ("that" being making regular exact drop in clones), and making regular .tbs image backups on an automatic unattended schedule. The advantage of the clones is that, as Phil said (or implied), there is no restore operation necessary. A screwdriver and 5 minutes are all you need to get up and running again. But the disadvantage of clones is that you must remember to actually make them and you have to devote an entire disk to each one.

The advantage of regular .tbs image backups are that they can be automatically scheduled to be made unattended and a lot of backups can be fit on one big 1.5 or 2 TB external drive. So, for example, some of mine get made to either of a pair of external USB hard drives in the middle of the night on an almost daily regular schedule. So they are more likely to get made and get made more frequently since I don't have to remember to do anything, except every now and then check the logs and remaining disk space to see that everything is working properly and to delete some of the older backups when I start running low on space (the Acronis auto consolidation feature has unfortunately never worked reliably for me).

So I do both kinds of backups. The manual cloning is more bullet proof because the restore step is eliminated but the image backups are more convenient and faster because many of them are incremental, and many separate backups can fit on one big drive, and backups are more likely to get made on the schedule I set since little or no user intervention is required. Restoring is easy too. Last time I had to restore my entire C drive from one of the .tbs image backups, it took about 30 minutes, iirc, and worked flawlessly. But there is always the chance that something could go wrong with the restore process, which is why I continue to make clones as well, just not as many as I used to.

Many years ago I learned the hard way what not having real and reliable regular backups could cost and it wasn't fun. Having a good backup system takes a lot of stress out of computing, allows me to take more risks without fear of the potential consequences and has saved my butt many times.

 

To be clear, I did say it takes only five minutes to swap the clone for the original and swapping was all that was necessary (no restore!).

I consider my A-B-C system an advantage as nothing else needs to be done. I have 4-5 PC's (3 laptops) on my home wired gigabit network and every change saved in a file on one is synchronized automatically to the others over the network - a home equivalent of Carbonite (everybody's heard of that) for those without extra machines but with internet access.

Not much to differ with from what I described above except that my incremental synchronizations are automatic and don't have to be scheduled.

Regards,
- - Phil

 

I didn't know that option was available and knew I was going to do a wipe... so my system came with Home "I should have ordered Pro, but I thought it would be a waste of money since I was formatting" and I bought Pro from newegg for 139.00.

I retrospect, that would have been a better solution.

theoretically I could still download Home and put it on another system with my OEM # that came with my system since its not in use.

 

Too cool.... all the credit goes to <link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CWINDST%7E1%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w unctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w ontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:shapedefaults v:ext="edit" spidmax="1026"/> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:shapelayout v:ext="edit"> <o:idmap v:ext="edit" data="1"/> </o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]-->Axel Foley, He compiled the original list.. I just updated and added to it.

I searched for weeks before I found it.... Just remember if you ever update HP Mediasmart Smartmenu to a later version be prepared for them not to work again... seems HP left out some crucial files with the later versions.... if that happens.. just do a system restore point "before" you try to update or do a driver rollback in device manager.....

I'm happy with mine.. I don't intend to update.

 

FWIW, Alan, I'd download the image that contains ALL of them (a single DVD disk image) and just select which to install at bootup and supply the key for the version you select.

http://go.notebookreview.com/?id=525X832&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmsft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net%2Fmsvista%2Fpub%2FX15-65733%2FX15-65733.iso&sref=http%3A%2F%2Fforum.notebookreview.com%2Fmicrosoft-windows-7%2F428068-legal-windows-7-download-links-just-like-vista-before-50.html

Regards,
- - Phil

 

Cool.. thanks Phil.... not sure I've ever downloaded a 3gig file before!

Just sent you a PM.

 

I just did it today, Alan ... took 12 hours to download at my anemic 80kbytes/sec TW cable connection. Just finished writing the DVD.

Just answered your PM....

Regards,
- - Phil

 

Wow!.. I'm at 35% and have 30 min left to go on my wireless..... Thats almost scarey trusting a 12 hour download.

 

I was worried and sweating during the last hour .... its all edited and written to DVD now... all is good!

Don't forget the editing ... After you finish downloading the ISO, download this and extract it: http://code.kliu.org/misc/win7utils/...al_utility.zip - This program automatically removes the ei.cfg file, allowing you to install any version (Home Premium, Ultimate, etc.) provided you have the right key.

Regards,
- - Phil

 

For all you SSD afficionados out there, I stumbled upon this website, which not only helps you locate, price and compare SSDs of every size and capacity, it includes what can only be called an "encyclopedia" of the SSD, tracing it's history (however recent) and citing milestones over the past 5+ years in the technology and marketing of this wonderful storage medium.

Enjoy!

But first, a quick question: does anyone know:

1) How does the speed of flash memory (SD card or USB drive) compare to SSDs, HDDs

2) Can one effectively augment the fixed storage capacity of a notebook computer (with an HDD or SSD) by inserting, say, a 64GB flash drive? I know you can boot from one of these, but can you, say, put the OS on one, other software that you want to load from the SSD but lack the drive, or enough capacity on the drive?

The question has special relevance to those with only a 1/8" drive slot, so the SSD pickins are slim, low capacity and EX PEN SIVE, and even the HDD options have the same issues, though not as badly (ie, you can buy a 320GB HDD 1/8" but that's the max, and it spins at 5400 rpms and is slower by virtue of the physics of it's petite dimensions.

Much obliged. Now, ENJOY!

StorageSearch.com - leading the way to the new storage frontier

 

FWIW I just checked out the 'new' dv8 at HP.

Seems to me they just added the option of i5 processors (i5-430M, i5-520M).

Couldn't see anything else different from the previous offering.

 

Correct-a-mundo!

I posted that here two days ago to explain what some reported as a price reduction on the Dv8 when all HP did was offer the cheaper processor at the lower price point.

BTW, also noted in that post was that the SSD option now costs $670... OUCH! Not really any price reduction there!

Regards,
- - Phil

 

Great site, Jeff --- I particularly enjoyed the annual Buyer's Guide for SSDs as current breaking news in the technology! Great post! Worth a "rep" gift!

Regards,
- - Phil

 

Sorry Phil, must have missed your post. Yeah, the SSD option is a real sting now...
I went to pick up my SSD today but the Kingston's were out of stock. But I'm not bothered now - will have a good look through the site Jeff linked before I take the plunge.

 

Ouch!.. reminds me of the days when Ram was like gold and went up and down every day. with crazy fluctuations.

 

Here's a particularly good article from that site on how to assess SSD write cycle life - I sleep better now!

SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance" article in STORAGE search .com

Seems it is unlikely that any of use "early adopters" have anything to worry about with our HP-supplied Samsung SSDs.

Regards,
- - Phil

 

Me, too, Alan. I'm still waiting for that "down" part!

Regards,
- - Phil

 

Yes, I've noticed that prices of some SSD's I've been watching have actually increased over the past couple of weeks. I think the supply has yet to catch up to the demand.

 

That's what I'm talkin' ...

Regards,
- - Phil

 

Honestly? Taking an afternoon nap.

 

I swear to God, I think someone jynxed me.

Ok, so I had to use my computer on battery today. Used it for sometime, when battery was around 12%, I plugged the cable in. What happened? Computer was plugged in, alright, but battery showed me it wasn't charging.
So now I'm stuck at 12% battery forever.
Since I plugged it in while still turned on, I assumed if I shut down the computer, things were going back to normal. What a mistake... after shutting down, I tried unplugging and plugging again, the "charging" light went on for 3 seconds and then turns off. When I boot up the computer, same thing: "plugged in, but not charging".
For God's sake, how can I solve that? Please tell me it's the adapter and not my battery. I can't take problems and hardware errors anymore! ><
What is wrong with this computer?!

Thanks, all

Edit: I allowed the computer to stay on for awhile...and the charging light indicator is now on. The taskbar icon, though, is not animated. Apparently, it says it is charging. It was animating, the bar filling up...but the charging light went out-on-out-on...and now seems to be stabilized. But the icon stopped animating. Since it's now 15% available, I believe it is charging. Anyway, do you guys know what may be causing this? Is this a single event? Is my battery/AC adapter faulty?

 

Certainly have to get some rest sometime.

Regards,
- - Phil

 

Generally NOT wise to plug in charger when laptop is running - DOUBLY bad when the battery is down to auto-shutoff level.

I doubt that the AC adapter is bad. It may take a while for the power regulation system to readjust to the shock you've given it.

Best practice is to minimize depth of discharge. When connecting the charger, be sure the laptop is off to minimize power surges into laptop and battery at same time.

Regards,
- - Phil

 

Didn't know that, Phil...

So you're saying things will get back to normal by itself? If not, what should I do? I know there is a procedure of turning off, turning on only with the AC, then turning off, placing the battery and AC, etc...don't really know if this resets something or actually works.
The icon is filling up, but not animating. 56% available. Don't really care about the animation, since it seems to be recharging. That's good enough for me.

I thought it was no problem plugging it, since it was something recommended by the computer itself. And the reason I let the computer get near 10% was because I assumed that, from time to time, it was good to let the battery drain a little and then recharge, am I wrong? I'm always using it plugged in + battery and I know this can reduce battery life. I heard that doing this procedure could prevent battery to die soon enough.

Thanks for the tip.

 

HP Battery health center:

HP Battery Health Center

Decent read.

 

Won't know till it's been through a couple of cycles. I hope so...

Let's see what it does and then worry about that when all the circumstances are known.

Sounds harmless but I would wait and see what the real situation is later.

That may be to protect your data from being lost during a power crash. Still not a good idea for the hardware but certainly not a guaranteed way to destroy something. Just good practice!

Plugging it in while that low on battery is bad and that was what I was critical of. Besides that, these are Li-ion batteries and moderate occasional discharge to 20-50% is okay. Deep discharge will definitely reduce battery cycle life and capacity.

Operating while plugged in most of the time is fine since the battery is kept fully charged. Occasionally, starting up solely on battery and discharging down to 80% is my practice and I've never needed to buy a replacement laptop battery.

Regards,
- - Phil

 

Interesting stuff, 2.0 but, while it might calibrate the battery monitor to fully discharge a fully charged battery every 3 months, it will shorten battery life cycles and capacity. Not worth it IMO.

Regards,
- - Phil

 

FWIW I use an app called BatteryBar to provide charge time, battery time remaining and discharge rates. It's free. If nothing else it predicts remaining time based on charge level and discharge rate - the windows battery icon only gives a % remaining figure, as you know.

 

Indeed. Battery bar is an excellent program. Highly recommended.

Osiris Development - BatteryBar, the most accurate battery meter for Windows

 

I agree - I've been using it for months now and find it's much more informative than the Windows battery indicator.

Regards,
- - Phil

 

It's actually not "windows" battery indicator - we would be able to see "time left" etc but that's just not how HP does thing (ex. Dell's show time remaining, etc)

 

So what? -I make no distinction between HP and Windows since they are running under Windows on our Dv8's! Some install from scratch and have the Windows one but THAT is irrelevant. What SHOULD matter is that I like the Battery Bar and so will you!

Regards,
- - Phil

 

battery bar. amazing. Was passively looking for something like this for a while. thanks!

 

Hi,

I checked up my order status and it looks like my customized dv8t shipped today. I wanted to be ready with its arrival and wanted to ask you guys on the prep.

a. The first thing I should do is create recovery discs? I read that the recovery disc should be DVD+/-R and not RWs. Do I need to do this recovery disc procedure OR do a complete HDD image? If complete HDD imaging is the best approach, what is the best software that can do this painlessly? I'll be moving the 500GB HDD to the second bay and insert a 128GB SSD drive. The 128GB SSD drive that I'm planning to buy is this: Newegg.com - Crucial CT128M225 2.5" 128GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD). Do I guys know if this is a good one and also supports TRIM?

b. Do I also need to backup C:\swsetup folder? What does this folder contain?

c. I wanted to do a fresh install of Windows 7 Home Premium onto the SSD drive and then do a selective install of all the reqd drivers and needed software minus all the trial and the bloatware.

d. Do I need to buy the HDD bracket from HP when moving the 500GB HDD to the second bay? I thought I don't need to buy brackets when moving to the second bay. Also, I'm not too sure whether the SSD drive that I'm going to buy: Newegg.com - Crucial CT128M225 2.5" 128GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) comes with brackets.

Please reply.

 

@undervolt:

A) Yes, you should burn the recovery disks to regular (non rw) DVD's and if they fail verification, keep re-burning them until you get a non corrupted set of recovery disks. This is always a good thing to do early on. That way no matter what happens, you can always get back to the original factory load. It's also good to have for reinstalling the factory load after you have securely wiped the disk clean of your personal data, if/when you should ever want to sell it.

I'm not familiar with the particular SSD you mentioned above so cannot provide and info about that.

B) As a general matter, you should create regular backups of your entire installation, not merely the C:\swsetup folder. But until you are able to do that (which would, of course, also back up the swsetup folder), it's not a bad idea to back up that folder as well as the HP Tools partition (although both of these would also be restored if you did a recovery from the DVD recovery disks you just burned in A above. So it's not really essential. It's far more important to acquire the necessary equipment and software and get into the habit of regularly backing up your entire installation, (i.e, both drives, assuming you have, or will have, two). There have been some recent discussions in this thread on various backup strategies and methods you might find helpful.

C. Imo, unlike with Vista and XP, a clean install of W7 provides very few, if any benefits, over the HP factory install, and as Phil has eloquently pointed out, a clean install is ( paraphrasing) "fraught with difficulties and risks" or words to that effect, and I agree with that POV. Consequently, I don't recommend doing a fresh install of windows 7. There is nothing wrong with the HP install and it is quite a lot of work to do a fresh install and get everything working properly, and all for very little, if indeed any, real benefit.

A much better approach, imo, is to simply use the HP install and uninstall any trial apps or other apps or so called "bloatware" you don't want or need. You can use a free program like Revo Uninstaller which will clean the registry of most remnants, junk files and other detritus left behind by the various uninstallations. Alternatively, after you have uninstalled all the things you want to remove, you can manually clean the registry using a free app like CC Cleaner or some other registry cleaner to get rid of the junk left over from the uninstalls. This is much easier than doing a fresh install and trying to get all the drivers, buttons and functions working correctly and is more likely to result in a correctly configured system.

If you are not satisfied with the version of W7 that comes preinstalled on your machine and wanted to do a clean install so you could have a different version of Windows 7, you can use the same key you were going to use for doing a clean or "fresh" install to simply upgrade to that version of W7 using the "Anytime Upgrade" procedure (Google for more info on that). This leaves all your installed programs and settings intact but allows you to upgrade to W7 Pro or Ultimate. I upgraded my HP installation of W7 HP to Ultimate and it took 5 minutes and went brilliantly.

If you still want to do a clean install (and opinions do differ on whether this is the best way to go or not), you will have to search for one of the various guides that have been created on exactly how to proceed, unless someone else here provides a link.

D) If your machine came with only one hard drive installed, you WILL need the HDD bracket kit for the DV8 which can be purchased direct from HP or from various 3rd parties. The price is between $30 and $40 iirc.

The drive from NewEgg will not come with the special brackets and parts you will need to install it in your HP laptop.

Good luck however you decide to proceed.

 

I'm one to disagree. I completely wipe the computer and start fresh. I know, and can tell you for certain, that fresh win 7 and the latest drivers from the driver forum thread will work flawlessly, as that is what I am typing from right now. I can't stand not to have the latest and most upgraded. Thats just me though.

Yes, you will have to buy the bracket for the 2nd HD. A tip, the bracket is the EXACT same as the HDX16/18, so search ebay for those as well, and it might save you money (this is what I did when the DV8 first came out)

Ben

 

Thanks Ben and pae77.

Ben: Why can't I just move the 500GB HDD to the second bay directly? Doesn't the primary bay come with brackets which I can use them to move to the second bay?

Thanks.

 

Just to be clear, I didn't mean one shouldn't upgrade the drivers to the latest versions. Of course I do that. I always run with the latest version of everything unless there is some specific reason not to (which is very rare). But one doesn't need to start from scratch with a clean W7 install to do that.

You are going to need a total of two sets of brackets. One for the HD you already have which. of course already has the brackets attached to it, and one more set for the new SSD.

 

Seems those directions don't work so hot for win7

Unless I babysit and keep playing with the computer.. I see no way to turn of power management other than to stop the service.....

whats the easiest way to calibrate the battery without manning the computer?

 

The trouble with calibrating the battery gauge is that it requires running the battery down which causes a lot of wear and loss of capacity on lithium batteries. Ideally, they should never be discharged more than about 60%, which isn't very practical, but which if followed will really extend the useful life of lithium batteries. They hate to be deeply discharged and they love to be topped off. So I don't worry about the battery gauge. I'd rather have my battery's capacity and usable life not get reduced unnecessarily.

But I do like that little Battery Bar app. It's very cool. Thanks for the recommendation whoever mentioned it first.

 

No worries Peter. Nice to actually contribute something to the thread rather than just soaking up the knowledge like I have so far!