Should be getting my Envy 15 today!

I was looking to get an Acer 3820TG or 4820TG but found what I think is a great deal for a HP refurbished Envy 15.

I got an i5/4gb/500gb/5830/1368x768 for $795 shipped! (This includes about $18 eBay Bucks and 8% Bing cashback. Gonna miss you Bing! )

Anyway, I have started wanting to play some PC games because some 360 games just look like crap in comparison. (Modern Warfare 2, I'm looking at you.)

I tried gaming on my Macbook Pro i5, but I have it hooked up to a 1080p LCD and it just can't game at that resolution. I tried lower resolutions, but they don't fit on the screen great. So, that was my excuse to buy a gaming/portable system! (My Macbook is portable in theory, but for $1800 it's not to me!)

So while some of the reviews scare me, this was the best system by far I could find for that money with a decent video card. Hope I like it! Otherwise I can return it within 7 days.

 

did you buy it from the colorado computer guy on ebay? we're also receiving one from him today with 7-day return policy.

 

Yep! That's the company. Which one did you get?

 

I got one with the same specs as my current one (i7 820, 2nd gen) for my wife. we ordered one for her previously but it had the blank screen problem so we returned it to HP for refund.

I recommend to test it out thoroughly - the blank screen problem seems to become evident soon after purchase, for me it happened on first bootup. I also ordered one from HP the other day during the brief bing cashback 30% off - out of these two at least one should not have the blank screen problem.

 

Thanks for the advice.

I'll definitely be beating the heck out of it for the next few days to make sure everything is fine. I'll be installing some games and using it as my primary computer for a while.

I am hoping because it is refurbished that everything has already been fixed.

 

Yes, same here. A little worried about the SSD, though. If somebody used it a great deal with an older Intel Rapid Storage driver, it might have gotten filled up and have lower read write speeds as a result and i'm not sure the best process to correct that.

 

Congrats on your new laptop! Kinda.

 

Thanks, Virtuous! It's new to me.

Got it today and looks good! Only a few nitpicks. HP cheaped out on the refurbished box. I don't care if they change the serial or whatever, but c'mon use the better packing stuff.

Second, the power brick is pretty big.

And lastly, moviemarketing you need to check your warranty as soon as you receive your laptop! I just checked mine and it has 40 days left of the 90 day warranty. I guess HP starts the clock as soon as they sell it. I chatted with their techs and you can fax them your order paperwork and they will reset the clock.

All in all, damn nice looking laptop for $800! Now let me try loading some games! (Geez, HP. I hope the silver coins are worth all the crap you load on your systems..)

 

thanks for the tip bleclair! good to know.

did it come with the black velvet pouch and the manual on 2GB SD card?

This fakakta UPS guy hasn't showed up yet. although the status said "On delivery truck" as of 6am this morning

 

We just received it and I see what you mean about the refurb packaging now! HP was like "We ain't gonna spend a dime on this ghetto-a s s box!"

 

Where did you guys order this PC from? Could you provide a link to this "Colorado Computer Guy"?

 

Here you go, JS:

eBay My World - colocomputer

The owner's name is Timur and he seems like a decent guy on the phone.

 

Didn't see the sleeve but found the 2gb card.

Update on the warranty situation: I e-mailed the guy and he said he'd take care of it with HP. I just had to send him the info (serial, product number, my address, name and phone number.)

Good price, fast delivery, good customer service and so far no black screens!

 

Wow, the 5830 is a pretty decent card! I can run Splinter Cell Conviction on High after reducing a few settings. I'm also impressed that the fans aren't too loud while gaming. That's normally one of my first dislikes of non Apple laptops. The speakers also sound really good but could be a little louder.

moviemarketing, are you considering purchasing any additional warranty? I was thinking about investigating Squaretrade or something. Not sure... Dumping more money into this kind of defeats the purpose of saving money, but a year warranty would be nice. I guess once I get the 90 day warranty thing squared away I'll have a few weeks to test and make sure it's a laptop I'll be hanging on to. Steam is furiously downloading a few more games for testing!

If I could run Mac OSX (legally) through a VM on this laptop, my Macbook would be on eBay today. (Guess that's why they don't allow it!)

 

your purchase price was pretty low, so it's kind of borderline whether to pay a few hundred more for 4 year plan. mine was a bit more expensive and I plan to get at least 1 year plan, perhaps more depending on the price.

Yep, I can pretty much run anything on 1920x1080p max detail at around 30-45FPS

And i'm sure you have been installing and removing drivers etc., that kind of stuff is what drives people to switch to mac

 

I was PC guy way (Dos 6.22 baby!) before Mac so I actually find some sick pleasure in configuring new systems.

I used Revo Uninstaller and cleared out the crap, then used msconfig to get rid of the rest of the unwanted startup stuff and it's running like a champ. I shared my DVD on another computer to install Splinter Cell so I'm still deciding whether I want to buy an external DVD. With sharing and Steam, I might not need one. (Although I would like to burn the backup discs.)

So far, pretty happy. Dang nice laptop for $800. eBay is going to get so much less of my business with the almost automatic 8% back from Bing going away...

 

the SSD benchmarks on the refurb unit seem to be significantly lower - maybe someone filled up the drive and didn't use the Intel Rapid Storage Tech? It supports something similar to the TRIM function I believe, but I don't know how to activate it in order to optimize the drives.

REFURB ENVY 15 (2 X Intel X18-G2 Raid0, after updating Intel RST)
Sequential Read : 481.440 MB/s
Sequential Write : 105.533 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 263.760 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 134.676 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 10.359 MB/s [ 2529.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 41.864 MB/s [ 10220.7 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 258.132 MB/s [ 63020.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 77.256 MB/s [ 18861.2 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [C: 12.0% (33.9/282.5 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2010/07/14 20:11:26
OS : Windows 7 [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)


NON-REFURB ENVY 15 (same)
Sequential Read : 514.681 MB/s
Sequential Write : 220.451 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 263.836 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 179.628 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 11.106 MB/s [ 2711.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 58.845 MB/s [ 14366.5 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 244.761 MB/s [ 59756.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 139.601 MB/s [ 34082.2 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [C: 28.9% (81.7/282.9 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2010/07/14 19:39:52
OS : Windows 7 Home Premium Edition [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)

 

Yeah, that does look quite a bit slower. I don't know much about SSD drives though.

Is that the next bottleneck in this type of system? The physical hard drive? Maybe I should look for a SSD.

I like to tinker... I just don't like the space/cost ratio right now.

 

Well Colocomputer sells some envy 15's with SSD's at a very low price. Depending on the processor, it shoud be around $950 - $1050 with SSD.