Volume, etc. Buttons Alt-Tab Effect...

When I am in Starcraft II (and presumably other programs, just have not used many others ) and use the volumbe buttons to adjust volume, it kicks back to desktop like I alt-tabbed. Starcraft II, like most games in full-screen (in my experience) does not like this, and does not always recover quickly.

Is there a way to stop this? Maybe turn off the actual display portion for volume or something?

 

You need to either disable the HP volume OSD or replace it with 3RVX matt.malensek

I'm surprised your sc2 takes awhile to load while alt tab...mines takes less than a sec to switch during a match without desync, no one noticed i alt tabbed.

Edit: Hmm, I like random15 explanation more than mine

 

EDIT: Whoops, Falco152 beat me to it. Oh well, maybe something in my post will be useful too.

Hello JVRR,

The issue that you are experiences is the result of some poor design on HP's part. You are in fact correct in assuming that you would suffer from the same issue regardless of what game you were playing. In fact, you will have the same result any time that you are doing anything fullscreen and use the volume controls (such as watching a video for example).

Unless something has changed in the last couple of months when I got my Envy which suffers from the same problem, there are essentially three solutions:

1. Just don't use the volume controls when you are doing something fullscreen, hardly a solution I know, but there are those who have simply adapted to this problem.

2. Uninstall HP MediaSmart and go without an on-screen volume indicator. If you don't mind not having a pop-up which shows you the volume every time that you change it, this is certainly an option. You will no longer get kicked out of fullscreen if you do this.

3. In my opionion the best option. Uninstall HP MediaSmart and install 3RVX (Original download: 3RVX: Skinnable Beautiful Volume Indicator For Windows 7. Download with Envy 13/15 skin included: 3rvx25 and envy skin.zip. All of this information is also on the first post of the Envy 14 Owner's Lounge.) 3RVX is a nifty program that replaces your on-screen volume indicator. It is a small download, customizeable, very easy to use, runs in the background with no effort, and has multiple skins. And, of course, it won't kick you out of fullscreen when you change the volume. You can configure it in many ways, my favorite being that you can set it to not pop up when you are doing something fullscreen. So if you are playing a game and want to change the volume you can do so without it getting in the way of what you're looking at. Of course you don't have to do this. After my clean install of Windows I ended up installing this program instead of MediaSmart and haven't regretted it once.

One small word of advice that I would give if you're planning on installing 3RVX, however, is that if/when you update your audio drivers, you may want to uninstall 3RVX first, install the driver updates, then reinstall 3RVX. I had some issues when I didn't do this the first time, but didn't have anyone confirm the problem when I posted about it so it may have been a one time deal. Just take that with a grain of salt.

All of that being said I have not checked out the changes that have been made in the newest versions of HP MediaSmart. For all I know an update has fixed the problem in the past couple of months. That might be worth looking into if you want to keep the rest of the MediaSmart stuff. If you don't have the latest version of MediaSmart and just want to try it out to see if they fixed the issue you can snag it off of the HP Software thread here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-drivers-software-forum/519991-software-popular-hp-notebook-software-collection.html. Goodluck!