My experience so far with the DV7-1170US

Hello everyone,

I've read the forums for a little while and saw the positives/negatives on the dv7....so I weighed out my options and decided to buy one.

My background:

Software Developer, writing mostly enterprise JAVA Webapps. As soon as I got the machine I needed to install apache tomcat, intellij, Oracle 10g, EditPlus, Documentum (which is pretty heavy), Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat Pro, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, etc. My point is, there was alot of heavy, memory intensive applications being installed on here. After about 12 hours of installs, I went from 286 Gigs to 201, and this was purely software installations.

Out of the box:

I opened the box, and once I caught a glimpse of it...it's a very imressive looking machine. Easy on the eyes with fantastic specs. I booted it up, went through all the HP jargon, and finally for the first time got to use Vista. I noticed off the bat that it wasnt as quick as I'd expected. So the first thing I did was uninstall as much HP and pre-installed software as I could...which means I got rid of just about everything except the HP QuickPlay software, and disabled the UAC which is incredibly annoying.

Once I completed the uninstalls, I rebooted and shutting down took about 10 minutes. I thought maybe it was because I just made a lot of changes to the system and Vista was recognizing them. So I finally get booted back up and instantly saw a huge difference in speed. It was like lightning. Next I got rid of the side bar and welcome screen, figured out how to remove the HP entries on the welcome screen and did that, and did my installs.

The Installation Procedure:

Well....for the most part....everything went okay. Vista hung on about 3 of the installs. After a reboot the program installed fine....except one.

AT&T Global Netclient took me about 2 hours to uninstall manually, and finally reinstall. I ran the same package that got screwed up the first time, and it worked the second time around. I was pretty frustrated with Vista at this point, almost to the point of re-imaging my machine with XP x64.

So I finally finished the installs, moved all my documents from the old laptop to this one, and rebooted once again.

I noticed that anytime I shut the computer down, it took on average 7-10 minutes to shut down, and a few times when it was shutting down I got the blue screen of death, but it always booted back up. This was annoying, and I'm still not sure what the problem is.

After I completed this around midnight last night, I started the defragment and went to bed. I awoke this morning and rebooted again. After the defrag I noticed that the computer was more responsive than ever. It FLYS. I actually cant believe that it's even quicker than it was before I installed all this software.

End Result:

I'm happy with the purchase. I absolutely love everything about this thing, minus the vista glitches. The screen is bright and responsive, and all the hardware on the computer is working properly and perfectly. Another plus for me was that my old Dell used to get HOT on the bottom...so putting it on your lap was a nightmare...but the dv7 doesn't really get hot at all. The sound is top notch...bluetooth is working well, and I really am very happy with my purchase. I got the computer for 1100 at PC Richard (who had it shipped the next day).

Now if only I could find a good DOCKING STATION for work! Any suggestions?

Well thats my first post, and I hope this helps anyone whose swinging on the fences about buying a dv7. If anyone has any questions I'd be happy to answer them.

Thanks everyone.

 

Thanks for the post, great that you got things sorted out with removing all the HP bloatware, it does make a huge difference in terms of performance to have that gone.

The dv7 doesn't have an option of a docking station per se, the solution HP actually offers is a Port Replicator, the xb3000 is their current consumer model that gets pretty good reviews:

http://www.amazon.com/HP-XB3000-Port-Replicator/dp/B000FVZC66

Edit:

Sorry, the xb4 is the current solution from HP, the xb3000 is the older model.

http://www.shopping.hp.com/product/computer/categories/docking_solutions/1/accessories/KG461AA%23ABA

 

I'm glad to hear that you have had a great experience with your new notebook.

-J.B.