Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
 The good, the bad, and the unavoidably H.P. August 31, 2010
Rich HArkins
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Just the facts. or at least anecdotal opinions (from a non-gamer who uses this type of device as a portable development workhorse):
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br /The good:
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br /* Fast. I've seen some other i7 units and this definitely keeps pace if not surpasses them. The memory and drives are very fast (2 x 7,200 RPM makes for some nifty RAID 1). Note that the graphics chipset seems to be set at 500MHz, not 1GHz but it seems very snappy to me still.
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br /* The display is great -- crisp and clear.
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br /* It's VERY quiet. Amazingly the quietest laptop I've even owned.
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br /* Virtualization works very well on this machine.
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br /* I'm looking forward to using a USB 3.0 drive on this someday.
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br /* Value for the money seems reasonable to me.
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br /The bad:
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br /* You can't have 3+ displays without a display port device. I'm seeing some confusion over whether it has to be active or not, but right now I'm guessing it has to be an active adapter to VGA or a display port monitor. I can't test the third display yet since I don't have an adapter...
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br /* I don't like the mouse pad. The multi-touch function is a pain, especially since the mouse buttons are part of the pad. This makes resting your trigger thumb rather touchy. It'd be nice to be able to disable it entirely without having to screw with X11 but no Fn key seems to do that.
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br /* The sound from the laptop speakers sucks. I'm a little biased on this since I'm going from the deep, epic sounds of the Harmon/Kardons of my Quasimodo to a set of speakers that have all the acoustic depth of a wet towel. When plugged into a more advanced system, they seem to work fine, but I don't really understand why I'm supposed to get all jazzed over this "beats audio" thing. The only thing it seems to beat is
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br /* It runs VERY hot when first purchased.
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br /The unavoidably H.P.:
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br /* Upgrade the BIOS and all the drivers right away. Doing that alone decreased heat output greatly for me. (I haven't been to the hospital for palm burns since.)
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br /* Battery life is not great, even with two batteries included. I'm estimating about 3-4 hours for BOTH TOGETHER. I capitalize not out of anger but to forewarn the wary shopper. This is a portable aircraft carrier, not a dingy. Higher heat levels = more power.
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br /* Why oh why does Windows/HP feel the need to take all four primary partitions on their laptops. (Make your backup DVDs early. Especially if you're a Linux user and are planning to repartition but might want to make sure they're available for later. Just sayin'. You don't want to be one of _those_ guys that has to dig out the recovery NTFS out of the partition table by hand because you accidentally turned on the dynamic drive looking for a way to get an extended partition.)
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br /* When initially started, before the BIOS upgrade, the fn keys would do BOTH the regular operation + the HP operation. Normally you would hold "fn" and then press F1 or what not, but the default state didn't seem to require the "fn" for whatever reason. The BIOS upgrade seems to have fixed that.
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br /This would be 4.5 stars if possible since it fits my personal needs (if indeed I can get the third display), but since I can't I have to rate 4 since the machine isn't really perfect.
 This is the one August 24, 2010
Ayoub Khaled A. Marefy (Kuwait)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I've been waiting for this laptop to arrive for 3 weeks now, it arrived and the packing was really soiled, amazons box and then the hp box and then the absorbent thing then the envys box, i started it, was really fast and i liked the new hp ui and custom stuff, i ran every thing together like a crazy guy "bitdefender+recovery burning+copying my old filed from an drive+google chrome downloading and installing+itunes+........more than 5 things at the same time and when one fineshes i start the next" believe it or not it took 15% of the cpu only, every thing is beautiful, one thing that really stunned me is when i opened my computer i only found 320 gb of hard drive,, where is the other 320 one ?
br /shouldnt it be 320+320 ?
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br /gonna try world of warcraft, warcraft, counter strike source, league of legends and many other games and tell u how it works"
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br /--- Update:
br /fixed the hard drive thing it wasn't in place right i installed it and its working, tested it on wow and its running great "60 fps on normal 30 on ultra while no one is around"
Not good enough August 23, 2010
KTC
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Before Envy 17, I have owned Lenovo T410. That is a great laptop but not for gaming and no Blu-ray drive in it. After intensive research, I chose ENVY 17. Like many users having described that, it is a powerful,and elegant notebook. But
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br /1. The ATI 5850 in it is about 50% of 3D power of its desktop version.
br /2. HP is very nice, including 9cells battery in the package but there are 2 reasons why HP does that , I think. 1) ENVY 17 would be getting too hot,so cutting its life span too short, if using 6cells because it leaves very little space for heat dissipation at the bottom. 2)The 9 cells battery lasts 1 hour for blu-ray play back, 1.5 hours for dvd, and 2 hours for internet only, to reach last 10% battery. I turned off keyboard backlight for all of them and wireless were off as well for both playback, and dimmed screen 2 levels down during the tests. Proportionally, 6 cells is about 30% less power than 9 cells.
Beauty and brains August 14, 2010
Wossen Wyatt (Tortola, British Virgin Islands)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
I've been using this notebook for a few weeks and I'm very pleased with it overall. The system feels powerful and responsive but that power comes at the expense of cooling. Under heavy load the right side becomes very hot. Too hot to touch in fact and you can even feel the heat through keys like caps lock, tab and the left shift and ctrl. That's one of the few caveats of this system. The others are the lack of a FireWire port for capturing digital video and the lack of RAID support. Although the system uses two speedy Hitachi HTS725032A9A364 hard disks there's no option in the BIOS to create a RAID 0 or 1 array with the disks. In my opinion HP missed an opportunity there to squeeze a few more drops of performance out of the system with RAID 0.
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br /Many reviewers have complained about the clickpad being quirky and annoying. HP has released an updated driver that fixes the problem and it's available on their web site. Once you install the update and familiarize yourself with the multi-touch gestures you realize they're very cool and convenient.
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br /Oddly, HP has chosen to make the secondary controls of the function keys active by default. Meaning that if you press the key shared by F7 and volume down, the volume down control will be triggered. You need to press the fn key (between the ctrl and windows log keys on the bottom row) to trigger F7. This is truly annoying at first but a quick trip to the BIOS lets you change it back to the way it should be so the function keys are triggered by default and the fn key is only needed for the secondary controls like volume, screen brightness, wireless toggle, etc.
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br /On the software side, unlike what the PDF specsheet states, this system does NOT come with Office 2007 trial or any other office productivity software pre-installed. The Corel video and image editors are present and accounted for but you'll either need to buy Office right away or install the free OpenOffice suite like I did.
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br /Gaming is a pleasure on this system as you would expect. So far I've played Batman Arkham Asylum on it at 1920x1080 resolution with the quality settings turned all the way up and the game is beautifully detailed and frame rate is completely fluid. Of course the system gets hot as hell during gameplay, but such is life, I guess.
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br /All things considered, I highly recommend the ENVY 17-1011NR to anyone who wants a powerful notebook.
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Great performing computer and well built. August 14, 2010
R. Vasquez
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The HP envy line is the higher end line of HP's laptops. They have many great features that you may find on higher priced laptops such as Mac's. Firstly, the processor on this thing IS FAST i was able to encode a full length movie in under an hour and I rarely see the processor go past 40%. Almost everything about this computer is perfect, the keyboard is great and the back-light isn't too bright, like on my previous laptop. At first I did not believe that the beats audio would make much of a difference, and it doesn't through the speakers, but man plug in a good pair of headphones or speakers and you can definitely tell the difference. I have done some gaming and the graphics card was able to play star-craft 2 at full settings as well as other games. The display on this thing is wonderful to look at as it really makes things pop especially blu ray movies, although you may need to visit hp's support site to update the dvd software to get certain blurays to play properly. I have yet to try the eyefinity as I don't own another monitor but I am hoping to get a nice set soon! The only gripe I have with this laptop is the fact that the left palm rest can get quit warm when playing video or games off the hard drive. Other than that I find every other aspect of this computer to be perfect. I had heard about people who had problems with their hp envy 17 but I believe that hp has improved manufacturing process as i did not have any problems nor did my friend who also bought this model. This is the type of computer in which when you hold it you can tell it is a well assembled machine. I must say though, this computer while portable is not going to be easy to carry from place to place, it it meant as a high powered desktop replacement. I recommend this laptop to anybody who requires great performance and not a lot in the means of portability.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
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