Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
 Best Value + Style + Power available July 14, 2010
Brian Adams (San Francisco, CA United States)
19 out of 20 found this review helpful
I'll be honest that a laptop from HP was far from my first choice. At the end of the day it was half the price of Apple and Alienware and way more stylish and feature packed than the Asus stealth fighter laptop. Every now and then I do want to transfer 10GB of movies and video's around so USB 3 and ESata ports in a desktop replacement laptop matter, something that Apple and Asus don't seem to care about. Heads up, this is a 17" but with 1920X1080 instead of 1920X1200 that you may have been used to before. This makes the laptop wider than my prior 17" Vaio I had owned... wide enough that it make the laptop feel massive. Enough so that I won't be carrying it around in a backpack anytime soon.
This unit ships with dual 320GB hard drives. First thing I did was order a SSD to replace the boot drive, so my experience is based on that modification. I ended up doing a fresh windows install so I never worried about bloat ware. Fortunately the installation files for everything short of the O/S were in a nice setup folder on the c:\ drive I replaced, so I can always re-install anything I may decide I want later.
At the end of the day this laptop is FAST. The windows experience index for the machine after the SSD upgrade is 7.0 which is good thing. Supreme Commander 2, Assassins Creed 2 both run with full detail at 60fps. There have been reports of unbearably hot palm rests and sub par quality on the assemblies. I had none of those issues. I'm gaming and surfing on a plain table (no cooler) and heat has not been an issue. In a quiet room I can hear the fan but typing the keys on the keyboard is louder.
The extras I like include the backlit keyboard, the status led lights on the mute and wireless function buttons, the led that lights up the RJ45 network jack when plugged in, the tiny led lights in the front left for power and harddrive activity, only having to remove 2 screws to replace the primary harddrive.
The only criticism would have to be the track pad. I've used a macbook with bootcamp and the gestures made more sense. Since the left and right "buttons" are simulated, the act of holding a "mouse" button down and dragging the mouse (when selecting text for instance) makes the mouse move in fits and jerks. I don't know if driver updates can ever fix that, but allowing us to simulate those interactions with just gestures (no physical clicks) would.
Beauty and brains August 14, 2010
Wossen Wyatt (Tortola, British Virgin Islands)
8 out of 9 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All things considered, I highly recommend the ENVY 17-1011NR to anyone who wants a powerful notebook.
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 ?
shouldnt it be 320+320 ?
gonna try world of warcraft, warcraft, counter strike source, league of legends and many other games and tell u how it works"
--- Update:
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"
just a great dea September 9, 2010
Jorge
My thoughts of the computer:
Playing with the computer for awhile, getting everything set up and working, the only thing i can think of this computer is, it is well built! It has a nice design over all, it is a super fast. the fact that this computer is mostly metal makes me think its very sturdy. personally i never cared for the looks of a computer, (i owned a lenovo thinkpad T61P which looked like crap) but this looks very handsome. A few things that annoy me, is that this computer gets very warm on the left side (under my left palm and where the vent is). one other annoyance is the mouse pad, because it isn't as responsive as i want it to be compared to the Apple mac book pros. also since the left and right click are apart of the touch pad there is a lot of frustrating with the mouse point going all over the place, even with the bios update there is some problems with it. Since this computer is pretty big, i think of this as a desktop replacement, and the battery life is what i expect it to be (short). typing on the keyboard was nice because it was very response and the keys are big and spaced out. the screen looks great, and the blu-ray drive is a nice bonus.
Pros:
Fast computer
Great graphic card
Nice keyboard
Blu-ray
great screen
HDMI out
Cons:
short battery life (even with the 6 and 9 cell)
mouse pad (it works but you might as well get a external one)
it gets warm on the left side (but that is what you get for stuffing powerful components in a small place)
Final thoughts:
For the price given by amazon this computer is a steal! trying to get the same configurations from the HP website will easily get you over 1800-2000 dollars, there are a few nice things beats audio, and the eyeinifity(which lets you put up 3 monitors at once), but in my oponion there just nice extras that come with the computer. In the end this computer was worth it.
Can't believe it's under review just when i am about to buy it! August 9, 2010
Stef
0 out of 6 found this review helpful
Can't believe it's under review just when i am about to buy it!
Please Amazon make it available again so i can buy it.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
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