brand new nw8440 - not as good as i thought

I just thought id report my experience with my new nw8440 since its worth mentioning.

I just bought my first laptop. ive never required one in the past. my primary profession is 3d animation and compositing, so i always opt for the most powerful desktop i can get when its time to upgrade. but ive been doing more work while travelling now so i thought i really needed the most powerful and lightweight machine i can get. a 17" was out of the question - they are all far too heavy and not portable enough to travel with.

after much research over a few months (i really wanted to get it right) it came down to the dell m65, the nw8440, and the macbook pro. i wanted the new core 2 duo - being 64bit and having 4mb cache - these things fly. for 3d rendering it stack up against my older dual xeon 3ghz machine. mainly because of the larger L2 cache.

unfortunately the graphics card in the MBP just didn't cut it, and since i needed dvi (almost non existent in 15" machines) that crossed off the dell m65. in the nw8440 i could at least get a dock with dvi. i wanted dvi because at home i have a dell 24" monitor that is pretty average when using vga.

so that left only the nw8440. I liked its deign functionally, the video card looked promising, and it was thin and only 2.7 kgs. the m65 is a bit chunky. i bought it online from pcsuperdeals. they were pretty good, it arrived in Qatar in only a few days all the way from America. after turning on the machine i was curious how id survive without a floppy disk drive and having a sata hd. hp forces you to create 2 restoration dvds which reimage the entire disk - ther is no option for multiple partitions. if you create a 2nd partition, and use these disks, it will wipe everything.

so i wasn't too enthused about that. and they don't supply any other windows installation disks. bloatware has been kept to a reasonable minimum, but i still didn't like the way it was configured. i tried installing another version of windows and got all the drivers from scratch, but it was a pain in the arse, after changing partitioning and trying to get the right drivers for the ati v5200, i never got it to work properly. i concluded in the end that this was impossible, after much discussion with tech support. they were knowledgeable - more so than any other tech support i've dealt with to their credit. however they dont support custom partitioning. now that is ridiculous. especially for a professional workstation. if your reading this hp - your a bunch of morons, get your act together and let pro users configure their machines how they need to.

the only solution in the end was to reimage with their software, and then i used partition magic to create an extra partition. i then had to use acronis instead of hp's imaging software to store my windows installation. acronis is awesome - i just switched to it from norton ghost and its brilliant. easy to use, fast, and no extra sata drivers to mess with.

another note - theres a mysterious drive z: which has 0 bytes, though it encourages me to format it if i click on it. i have a feeling this would be a bad idea, as it claims the size is then 80gb - the exact same size as the only drive in the machine. this has something to do with removing the hp recovery partition, which i have no interest in. it only pops up after i do that.

the fingerprint reader on this thing is rubbish. i've never used one before but after scanning my finger in, sometimes it just decides not to do anything. other times at best, it takes alot longer to validate than it does for me to actually type a password in! insane. so scrap using that.

next - music production. thats the other reson why i bought this laptop. after installing drivers for my external fireface, and external hard drive, and the windows firewire speed fix for sp2, the machine goes to the first windows screen with just a background and a mouse pointer. then nothing happens. i have since reimaged the machine 2 or 3 times and the problem keeps reoccuring. i haven't nailed the culprit yet, but im getting close. hp support obviously dont care about this - its an incompatibility with a non hp product - either microsoft or rme's issue. well its never happenned on any other machine so i blame hp.

for those that dont know, the fireface 800 is a $2500Au external soundcard. if it turns out to be the culprit, I wont be impressed that it doens't work with a brand new "top of the range" hp workstation. i hope these guys can communicate with one another though. im tired of companies blaming one another for incompatibility issues.

i'm currently in the process of reimageing this machine for something like the 4th or 5th time. hopefully ill nail the problem - i suspect it might be the microsoft firewire fix.

i also own a license of combustion so i thought id give that a test run. warning - there is no certification for combustion on the nw8440 yet, despite the myriad of isv certificates for heaps of other autodesk apps. it appears theres some incompaitiblity with the ati v5200 and quicktime within combustion. if you export or import a quicktime the program crashes. which for me means it doesn't work at all because quicktime is the only format available with lossless and efficient compression. i only hope ati, autodesk and hp remedy this.

stear clear of this machine if you want to do anything slightly advanced with it. as a wordprocessor, im sure it would do fine. im afraid ill be forced to sell mine second hand - "as new" on ebay and settle for a MBP (shame about those wimpy video cards in them though.)

very disgruntled and hoping someone in a high place reads this that can solve all my problems.

 

Actually it will not. If, when starting the recovery partition program up, you select the non-destructive recovery, and you will have the option to restore to factory condition but save your files in C:\Backup xx-xx-xxxx (I think that's the folder name).

I know for a fact that it will preserve other partitions as well. I just did it on my nc8430 three days ago.

What more do you want than 2 DVDs that will put in XP w/ all the drivers and install no bloatware? I've done a fresh reinstall from an XP disc and found no difference.

That is probably because you might have manually blew away with recovery partition using PartitionMagic. Go to Start->Programs->HP Backup and Recovery Manager->Remove Recovery Partition. That will wipe it out and merge the space with the C drive.

I know that some of the Dell machines have a firewire issue, and the users are certain it is a problem with the Core (1/2) platform and 1394 itself. I'm assuming that external sound card is firewire. Try booting the notebook (with device plugged in) in safe mode or most recent settings that worked to see if that helps you. I've had to do that occasionally as well, and this isn't the first machine I've done that with (and not all were HPs). Once it boots, reboot normally and you might be okay and it might not hang.

The last machine you had was pre-Core, which means pre-before-firewire-issue.

Ummm...didn't you look that up before buying this notebook? In any event, I would give ATI a call and see if they can help you.

 

"Actually it will not. If, when starting the recovery partition program up, you select the non-destructive recovery, and you will have the option to restore to factory condition but save your files in C:\Backup xx-xx-xxxx (I think that's the folder name)."

I haven't seen this option, and tech support didn't mention it to me. maybe the software i have is different, but ill look again next time i use those discs.

"What more do you want than 2 DVDs that will put in XP w/ all the drivers and install no bloatware? I've done a fresh reinstall from an XP disc and found no difference."

there is some bloat ware though, and i want to be able to setup my partitions as i want without using partition magic.

"That is probably because you might have manually blew away with recovery partition using PartitionMagic. Go to Start->Programs->HP Backup and Recovery Manager->Remove Recovery Partition. That will wipe it out and merge the space with the C drive."

i thought this was the case too, so i reimaged and did the removal of the recovery partition using that hp program from the startbar. it didn't make a difference. drive z: still pops up

"I know that some of the Dell machines have a firewire issue, and the users are certain it is a problem with the Core (1/2) platform and 1394 itself. I'm assuming that external sound card is firewire. Try booting the notebook (with device plugged in) in safe mode or most recent settings that worked to see if that helps you. I've had to do that occasionally as well, and this isn't the first machine I've done that with (and not all were HPs). Once it boots, reboot normally and you might be okay and it might not hang.

The last machine you had was pre-Core, which means pre-before-firewire-issue."

i haven't heard of that one actually. but yes i've tried going into safe mode, and the problem still randomly can pop up. the microsoft firewire fix adresses another issue where sp2 firewire drivers revert everything to s100 speed i think. thats what rme say on their site anyway.

"Ummm...didn't you look that up before buying this notebook? In any event, I would give ATI a call and see if they can help you."

just because it wasn't certified, i didn't think it wouldn't work. ive never had any machine with certifications and they've all been fine so i had no reason to believe this ati card in this machine would be any different.

but yes your right night_2004, i made several mistakes in buying this machine and deeply regret it.

 

Well, we'll try to fix as many of them as we can.

1) When you boot from the Recovery DVD, I believe it is the first option that you'll have to select to get to the "save previous info" dialog.
2) I think the only crap installed is the HP ProtectTools, what else do you have???
3) That Z: drive bothers me a little too. Next time (if there is) you restore it to factory condition and then use the HP program. It might be failing to properly remove the partition since it has already been blown away. You will have to backup your data to do this though. Talk about annoying though, restore to factory just to fix partitions and then restore again.
4) Check out this thread for the firewire issue. They might have some tips to help you. But that card is firewire right?
5) I would think it would work too. It sounds like a software problem. See if you can get some drivers from HP or ATI. ATIs drivers might solve the problem.

 

2) theres also a very short license of norton on there, which experies in a couple of weeks so theres not much point in having it on there. theres also a trial version of win dvd on there too which i dont like.

3) actually i did a full reimage of the drive using the hp discs. i then removed the partition using the hp utility. then drive z popped up a few days after that.

4) yeah the fireface uses firewire. i've definitely nailed the microsoft update as the cause of preventing the machine from starting up. i just need to sort out another method of getting the speed back up to s400.

5) hp now tell me that combustion is certified, so ill try their driver again.

 

Drive Z: sounds like an HP PhotoSmart printer memory card reader...

Let me know when you sell your nw8440 on ebay... I'm looking for another one!