HP ENVY 15-j059nr notes and observations.

Buying the latest and greatest brand new laptop you can get your hands on is always an interesting experience.

On the one hand you get a device that should have nice new drivers, and official support, on the other hand, since the actual user base is so low, there is very little actual useful information available about it and any problems you may have...

So with that in mind, I am making this post in an effort to put a little more actual end-user information out there about the new HP laptop I just acquired.

Laptop in question - HP ENVY 15-j059nr 

This machine belongs to the brand new line up of HP's ENVY 15 series.  

Features include the newest 4th gen "Haswell" i7 CPU, switchable graphics (nvidia and intel), 1080p screen, and an MSATA SSD cache drive.

Initial observations, this thing is nice and lite-weight, and quite thin for the power inside.

I was expecting the "metal" case to be "metal" all the way around the laptop, but it is a black plastic on the bottom of the laptop.  Also I was expecting the metal finish to look like metal, to me it looks more like silvery plastic, not at all like the pure metal feel and look of the HP TM2t-2100 I have.

Runs very cool compared to my previous i7 based laptop (Toshiba x505-q880).

Now on to some problems I have ran into so far;

Upon initial boot up, I let it get all it's windows updates, uninstalled Norton, and then proceeded to do the HP software and driver updates using the HP Support Assistant tool that came pre-installed.

This had a handful of updates, one of which was a BIOS update.

I let the updates happen, and it prompted me to reboot for the bios update, which I did.

The BIOS update completed normally, and rebooted the machine.

At this point Windows 8 would not boot.  

The laptop would show the HP logo on the screen, then almost immediately flash a Windows error screen (saying something about BAD COMPUTER INFORMATION) and would reboot.

It boot looped about 5 times, then the HP Recovery wizard took over and tried to repair windows, and failed.

At this point all I could do was preform a system restoration using the recovery partition and tools included on the laptop.

This led me to a cool discovery, the built in recovery options included with the laptop, include an "Install Clean Image" option, this option installs a clean install of Windows 8, with only drivers and HP software installed, no Norton, no Wildfyre Games, none of the junky bloatware, but all of the drivers you need!

Anyhow, preforming the recovery fixed windows, (de-bloated even!), and kept my BIOS update in place, things have been running well since.

I read a couple random discussions talking about audio skipping randomly, I have had this happen once so far, while listening to Google Play Radio, I attempted to do a speed test at speedtest.net, the playing audio stuttered and skipped for about 1 second while loading the flash speed test, I have not been able to reproduce this yet.

Here is a useful link to a forum post about changing the SSD cache drive into a bootable SSD drive, I intend on doing this myself soon;

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-envy-hdx/729085-envy-15t-j000-msata-ssd-hdd-fresh-install-msata-boot-drive.html

In summary;

So far, a good laptop, thin, light, cool, powerful, has a "Clean Image Restore" option in recovery that installs a clean Windows 8 install with drivers and no bloatware.  

Had strange issue when preforming BIOS update, after preforming BIOS update Windows 8 boot looped, and would not load.

Preforming a system recovery fixed windows, and kept BIOS update in place.

Some questions I still have;

How do I actually switch between the two video cards?

The HP TM2T that I have also has switchable video cards, but with ATI and Intel, and on that machine it is very clear which card is active and which is de-activated.  On this laptop I cannot find anything anywhere that says what card is in use, or anything that lets me pick, they both just appear active.


* EDIT  -  This link pretty much explains that the way Nvidia does switchable graphics is completely automatic, and does not have user control.  http://www.nvidia.com/object/optimus_technology.html

More to come as it is uncovered.

Questions about the laptop?