Ordered My 3rd Envy 14 Today

Ive been lurking here for over a month. Bought my first ENVY on June 14th. It had a bent case, misaligned track pad, The screen was popped off the outer casing (I just snapped it back in). There was also a scratch on the front lid, and the webcam was pointing in a completely different direction. Returned it, ordered another, Seemed perfect until I noticed the frame above the f8 and f9 keys was raised up kind of high. I know its picky, but I paid almost 1900 for the computer with 8GB ram, upgraded processor and 160 SSD. Ordered my last one today. Received 100.00 off the price, but get this...They were going to charge me the NEW price (with the 200.00 radiance display) I told them to just cancel it if I couldnt get it for the original price, and then they came back and said ok... Hope they get it right this time.

 

By frame, do you mean the keyboard tray? Or, do you mean the metal chassis was bent?

 

He probably means the frame, as mine is also a little raised, nothing to bother me though. I would've kept the raised frame if I were you. The many other problems you could encounter from the Envy 14 such as the whine and other even worse physical defects outweighs a small raise in the keyboard tray.

 

Maybe youre right, maybe I should have kept it...but i also think I could have got a much less expensive computer with the same specs...I do want it to look nice when im using it.

 

Hey man, I had a similar experience as you - just returned my third envy. The first one had a light greenish patch on the right side of the screen when looking at a white background. Easy enough to slip through QA, so I returned it. Second one had the hump in the middle just like yours (when I pressed on it, it made a clicking noise), slightly raised trackpad, but worst of all the right hinge was so far misaligned it was scraping on the frame.

That one went back last week and the replacement came today. Another misaligned hinge (but no scraping), no hump in the middle of the frame but a hump on the right side, gap in the frame between the right palm rest and base, and worst of all 4 or 5 deep scratches across the left side of the trackpad like it was scraped when seating.

Just hang in there - I know its frustrating but there will always be a few people that get bad luck a few times in a row. Eventually when a nice unit comes in you'll have the piece of mind that you got the quality you paid for.

I'm also not blaming the assembly line per se- its the actual engineering of the envy that's causing most of the problems. Trying to join multiple parts of a frame and trackpad by eye, with glue, seems ridiculous to me. Simple precision engineering could have made parts that either snapped or screwed together for a tight fit with less than a millimeter of variance.

 

I was also tempted in buying other computers with the same specs, but the Envy's 14.5" screen and resolution just seemed so perfect I couldn't resist. The Envy 14 really would be the perfect laptop if HP could just up the performance of its QC a little.

 

I agree, this is probably true and for most users that need the laptop quickly I think its best to bite the bullet. But for someone like me that's in no rush, I simply can not allow sloppy production to get pushed on/accepted by a consumer. If I have to I'll send the laptop back so many times they'll start losing money in shipping charges.

 

I wish I could be on the same boat as you; however, with school starting soon I can't afford to RMA my laptop even though there is the slightly raised keyboard frame and the unbearable whine when a USB is plugged in. It's up to you to make HP pay for all the inconveniences us school-goers are going to have to put up with.

 

Don't worry, I'm putting up the good fight. I filed a complaint letter today with the generic 'email the president of hp' link not expecting to hear anything, but had a voicemail and email to my work numbers/address asking to please call them back, so hopefully I can offer some constructive criticism.

I think even the phone woman was taken aback today when I told her I didn't want the $50 discount she was offering. I don't care about shipping, discounts, etc at this point... after waiting over two months to get a computer all I want is to have something that works without any major defects.

 

I'm sure everyone on this forum would agree with you. I'm tired of HP paying their customers to shut up and keep their defective laptops. I'm glad though that HP is making an effort to find out what's wrong with their Envy 14's by asking a few select people who have complained to send in their laptops for further testing and in turn receiving upgraded computers.