HP Fansite

HP Envy 15 has TWO fans

Bet you didn’t know that, huh? The HP Envy 15 has two fans for cooling, one on each side (upper left and upper right corners). Both act independently of each other in terms of speed… but when playing Left4Dead at full HD, max everything (All quality settings, AA), both blow out a LOT of air. The fans on the HP Envy 15 are generally louder than the HP Elitebook 8530w’s fan running at full blast, though not really as noisy or annoying as something like… the Pavilion dv-series.

More to come on the HP Envy 15 soon…

Thoughts about the Envy: Elitebook owners, don’t jump

I was lucky enough to get to try out a friend’s new HP Envy 15 (one of the first few shipments) and my impressions are… not so good. He got the Core i7 1.73 GHz config with full HD screen, 8 gigs of RAM and 500 gigs of disk space. I was under the impression that the ATI Radeon 4830 paired with i7 would beat the poop out of the Nvidia Quadro graphics found in the Elitebook 8530w and 8730w in terms of gaming performance. I was right – Windows 7′s experience rating was higher on the Envy 15 in just about every aspect versus the Elitebook 8730w. Build quality is amazing on the Envy and the notebook is heavy on both features, style… and weight too, once Jon slapped on the extended battery.

The Envy 15 has an ugly side though, which I noticed almost immediately after initial setup of Jon’s photo+video editing software, media players and games:

• The touchpad ‘lock’ click wasn’t working out of the box and the touchpad would lock itself from time to time, leaving no other way except to use an external mouse to move around. My mistake, sorry. The setting for the touchpad lock to activate is ‘Long press’ by default. Envy 15 owners take note, you can change this in the Sypnaptics touchpad menu
• The row of quick access buttons on the immediate left side of the notebook did more harm than good – I don’t know about everyone else, but at least five people here had trouble typing and kept hitting the ‘Browser Launch’ button everytime they reached for the Caps Lock key.
• Though it had much higher frame rates in several modern games, the Envy 15 seemed to produce slightly coarser results to the eye compared to the Elitebook 8530w/8730w twins who attended our little local notebook unboxing party. Settings were all the same: full HD (1920 x 1080 on Envy 15, 1920 x 1200 on Elitebooks), all settings on high, 4X AA, etc. Maybe it’s because of Quadro workstation graphics, maybe it’s because of ATI… But seeing that the Elitebooks could play at decent frame rates, my personal choice would be average frame rates + quality frames instead of the Envy’s high frame rates + lower quality frames, but that’s just me. For the untrained eye/non-hardcore gamer, this shouldn’t be an issue
• We had plenty of struggling around (And still do) whenever we tried to attach the extended battery.
• The notebook’s display would auto-dim and then brighten up again when running processor intensive tasks – nothing to do with Windows 7′s ‘dim screen’ power setting.
• The notebook would auto-off intermittently when using the extended battery. There’s also something that’s more than just a ‘contact problem’ with the extended battery as it intermittently goes from ’2nd battery undetected’ to ‘charging’ to ‘not charging’ – all this when the notebook is sitting perfectly still on the table!

Maybe a few updates in the future to the Envy 15′s BIOS and firmware and drivers might work. Fingers crossed.

HP Elitebook 2810 whispers?

Well, something is brewing at HP and whatever it is, I expect it to be coming soon. Judging by the rumors and sightings compiled this week, it seems that HP may be planning a launch of products aimed at business/enterprise users. Well, we already heard about the rumored Elitebook 8440w, 8540w and 8740w notebooks last month when people were talking about the two new Envy models and other consumer notebooks/netbooks (lots of links about that out there, Google it yourself). Those notebooks are updates to the existing Elitebook 6930p, Elitebook 8530p/w and Elitebook 8730w respectively, and the 2nd digits in the model names of the yet-to-be-announced Elitebooks point to a 14 inch model, 15 incher and a huge 17 inch Mobile Workstation respectively. The last two digits (“40″ series) are indicative of minor updates, so don’t hold your breath for a major overhaul – my bets are DDR3 RAM and graphics, 7200 RPM hard disks as a standard, multi-touch trackpads with the ‘nipple’ mouse AKA trackpoint and a slim chance of a tool-less chassis for easy RAM swapping (ala the existing HP Mini 5101). Probably there will be a few more extra bells, whistles and fancy things added, if HP is feeling generous enough – afterall, the W-series are supposed to be HP’s top-range Mobile Workstation notebook series.

I’ve strayed far enough from the topic I was gonna talk about, so let’s get right back to the whispers about the HP 2810. There’s been talk and hearsay about a certain “2810 model”, some have even claimed to have seen an actual unit floating around – but getting the latest gossip is harsh in the Windows world: people tend to be a lot more interested in extremely hyped-up, potentially-staged Apple rumors and speculation (the latest hype being the rumored Apple Tablet computer). There’s a tendency for other rumors from other PC makers (HP, Dell, anyone else) to be suppressed by the sheer amount of Apple hype and speculation around – so the occasional, rare sighting/news about new HP things is always welcome.

So what is this 2810 model all about? Is it the replacement to the ultra-portable Elitebook 2530p? Perhaps a successor to the the Elitebook 2730p tablet? A completely new ultra-portable business machine from HP? Even I’m puzzled – I keep seeing and hearing the these four digits around, and reports of ‘sightings’ but no one seems to be able to cough up any description of its purpose.

Spotted: HTC Touch Diamond-ish HP iPAQ is out there

Someone (well, actually a few people) out there has just spotted a full-touch HP iPAQ out in the wild. Described as ‘a full-touch device with a widescreen touchscreen’ and ‘looks like a HTC Touch Diamond 2 with a more elegant design’, it sounds like something to look forward to… and looks like all is not lost for the few iPAQ fans out there (myself included). The device is set to run Windows Mobile 6.5, apparently with a custom skin over the default UI (Touchsmart interface for iPAQ anyone?!) and has either a WQVGA or WVGA screen (hopefully the latter), but little else is know about the mysterious device.

If asked about the credibility of such “rumors”, this info comes from several reliable sources and it’s been confirmed that it ISN’T the iPAQ K3 since the device has a candybar form factor (iPAQ K3 looks more like a Blackberry, definitely not a candybar). Let’s just call this thing the iPAQ X since we have no idea what HP will name their next device. But anyway, there’s also word that this elusive iPAQ X has an ‘evil twin’ which sports a slide-out keyboard. Looks like HP wants to follow HTC’s trend of releasing two similar WM smartphones, one being touch-only (HTC Touch Diamond) and a keyboard-version (HTC Touch Pro). Time will tell, and I can’t wait when HP makes an official announcement (hopefully soon, please!)

Installing Windows 7 on the HP Mini 5101 (guide)

I got hold of the Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit disc  the other day and went straight to install it on my HP Mini 5101. Yes, after about five days using Windows XP for the first time in year (at least in normal day-to-day use), I felt like tearing my hair out using the now-ancient UI. No Aero Peek for my windows, crummy file explorer, no ability to search directly for a program, rather basic (versus Vista and Seven) power management area, very crappy Windows Update interface (yeah, you know, the browser-based ActiveX one…), and the list goes on. My initial plan was to install Windows 7 alongside XP and have a system that I could dual boot, but the fact that Windows XP Home couldn’t connect to corporate networks (versus XP Pro) was the last straw.

So I wiped the hard disk clean and did a clean installation of Windows 7. What I was surprised with was the fact that a fresh installation took a mere 32 minutes on an Intel Atom netbook, which is pretty darn fast in my book. I remember that both XP and Vista took longer than that – on more powerful systems too! Installation of Windows 7 was hassle-free for me, the system basically took care of everything after entering the product key up to its ‘first’ boot-up.

I didn’t have to download many drivers manually from HP’s website since Windows 7′s Windows Update utility knew exactly what to do. The drivers I DID download from the official HP Mini 5101 drivers page for Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit include:

• SoundMAX audio driver (Great stuff, it has the same interface and ‘Sonic Focus’ feature found on higher end HP notebooks such as the Elitebook 8730w)
• Wireless drivers (Gotta have these if you want to use WiFi)
• HP 3D DriveGuard (Invaluable protection for your hard disk)
• 2 MP webcam driver

The things that Windows Update automatically found and installed include the Synaptics Touchpad v7.2 driver and Intel graphics driver (a good thing too, since the Intel driver from HP’s website couldn’t work on Windows 7). All-in-all, my Windows 7 installation on the HP Mini 5101 was very smooth with no hiccups. The OS runs on Atom like a champ – everything on Windows 7 is prettier, more functional and flashier than Windows Vista, yet there wasn’t much noticeable ‘lag’ in the animations and starting up of applications.

Bootup time with an ‘empty’ system took about 15 seconds (excluding BIOS screen display). However, bootup time was not as fast as I hoped for AFTER I installed my favorite apps (which include Office 2007, Firefox, AVG Free + Spyware Blaster, TweetDeck, Windows Live Essentials and Foxit Reader) – it now takes about 100 seconds to cold boot the Mini, but I’m cool with that – the old Mini running Vista with the same software/content takes almost five minutes nowadays. I’m now putting the Mini 5101 into either Sleep or Hibernation mode most of the time since they run a LOT faster than older versions of Windows. Sleep mode, especially, screams fast, fast, fast! – the Mini 5101 goes to sleep in about three seconds after I hit the power button, and wakes up in four.

Another post-installation issue with Windows 7 on the Mini 5101 is not really a big issue, in fact… but I was disappointed that the ‘glowing’ Windows logo startup animation is only possible on screens with 1024 x 768 or 1280 x768 resolution and above. The HP Mini 5101 I have has a crappy 1024 x 600 screen: so no pretty animations for me during bootup – instead, there’s the boring Vista-style blank screen with ‘running status bar’ animation. I have plans to get the Mini 5101′s replaced by a third party to the 1366 x 768 high-res option and I’ll post about that if I do.

If you have any questions regarding Windows 7 on the Mini 5101, feel free to fire me an e-mail or post in the comments area below!