*HP EliteBook 8740w Owners Lounge - PART 1*

[m8o]

Raelin, I'll add to what NotebookGrail said.

I'd personally say "using Windows" in 10-bit mode is more of a hindrance than benefit if you are one who makes use of and enjoys the features of Aero. That being due to the sometimes start-up problem, lose of the WinKey+Tab 3D behavior, or seeing a live preview of the actively running app when mousing over the app on the Start Bar, funky icons, funky Webpages, and other things I'm sure. It really can only be taken advantage up in true "color managed" applications. As far as I know not even Lightroom takes advantage of it, that that's my main tool on my 8740w.

Now with that said, keep this in mind. The bit-mode will not affect the range of colors [Gamut] the screen can produce, just the number of colors produced within the gamut. (I think I might put this in my sig) So what this is to say is don't confuse color gamut with the number of distinct steps of color, which is now over 1 billion with 3 channels at 10-bit. So you can still operate windows in Full/Native Gamut, AdobeRGB Gamut, or sRGB Gamut, all with 16.7 million distinct colors (8-bit), or the same gamuts with over a billion distinct colors (10-bit). In either instances (10 or 8 bit) the 'deepness?' of the color that can be shown will not change.

Have you seen my post showing the off-angle performance of the screen? (many pages back at this time) Post #2237: http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-e...ml#post6470413 When you consider that on any 17" in your lap or within reach of your arms and eyes you're looking at the corners at perhaps a 20 degree angle, the fact that this DC2 display has the viewing angle that it has makes the whole image on the screen more uniform and brilliant.

[TechAnimal]

Hmm. I wonder whats the minimum 'bitness' of the display required to show the different colour spaces. Or whats the number of colors present in each color space?

[Thecla]

There is an update on the HP forum about the memory crashing issue:

8740w shuts off with four memory chips - Page 6 - HP Support Forum

with a software fix for non-vPro enabled systems. Apparently vPro systems will require a hardware fix (which I guess must've been made already to the recently shipped systems since mine is vPro-enabled and it doesn't crash).

Not sure what conflict caused the crashes.

[DeTomaso]

Got my HP 8740w this week so i am a new member of the club!

First thing i did was ordering an Intel X25-M 160GB SSD to replace the hard drive. I got a 7.6 harddisk score now in Windows Performance Index, up from 5.9 . Booting up W7 Pro64 to desktop went down from 55 sec to just 24! It is really quite fast and i am not regretting spending 400$ on it, although that is quite an investment. Sadly the 8740w doesnt support 2 drives and an optical at the same time but with usb3 finding a fast external HDD for mass storage shouldn't be a problem.

I updated BIOS, graphic drivers, SSD tools etc. and ran some benchmarks. On 3D Mark06 it scored an impressive 13046 and thanks to the SSD a PCmark64 score of 12340. Should be future proof for a while...
Thus so far i am really happy: build quality is top, screen is decent, very quiet operation, great keyboard and trackpad, useful HP utilities. Only concerns i got right now are about the batteries running time and the amount of heat under load. I would say it gets up to 45-50 Celsius on bottom and close to the fans, so holding it on your lap for long is quite uncomfortable. But as this is a desktop replacement those problems shouldn't come as a surprise. Same story for the size/weight of the laptop and the power supply, its portable but by no means light.

One thing i am wondering: my RAM windows performance index was only 5.9, with 2x2 1333 modules. Do you guys get a similar score and do i need more ram to get that score up? Or doesn't it really matter for overall performance?


8740w: i7-620, 4GB ram, M7820, 160GB SSD, Win7Pro64, WSXGA+ screen

[NotebookGrail]

Got my HP 8740w this week so i am a new member of the club.

One thing i am wondering: my RAM windows performance index was only 5.9, with 2x2 1333 modules. Do you guys get a similar score and do i need more ram to get that score up? Or doesn't it really matter for overall performance?

DeTomaso, welcome to the club. Yes, i did see a increase in RAM performance index after installing additional RAM. With 2X2GB i had 5.9. Now with 2X2GB+2X4GB(total of 12GB), i see a score of 7.9..The only low score now is from HDD which is 5.9. But, that should go up when i put my SSD.

[m8o]

Hmm. I wonder whats the minimum 'bitness' of the display required to show the different colour spaces. Or whats the number of colors present in each color space?

I'd guess only a few bits need be used to show the extents of 'a color space', with ridiculously huge banding between the steps of colors.

The number of colors in any real, analog, non-digital color space is, infinite; colors are created by relative differences in wavelengths of light, and the number of fractions that exists between one whole number and the next is again, infinite. In the digital realm, it's distinct steps; the more steps the closer you simulate the real-world, analog, smooth gradation of colors in a color space. The bit depth defines how many samplings of the infinite our display can reproduce & show, and how smooth, banding free, and undetectable to the eye and mind, the gradation from one color to the next will be.

[TechAnimal]

Good explanation mate. I guess i'll be running in 10bit mode when editing my photos (10 bit RAW files) and 8 bit for everything else until the Aero problem is fixed.

[Raelin]

Raelin, I'll add to what NotebookGrail said.

I'd personally say "using Windows" in 10-bit mode is more of a hindrance than benefit if you are one who makes use of and enjoys the features of Aero. That being due to the sometimes start-up problem, lose of the WinKey+Tab 3D behavior, or seeing a live preview of the actively running app when mousing over the app on the Start Bar, funky icons, funky Webpages, and other things I'm sure. It really can only be taken advantage up in true "color managed" applications. As far as I know not even Lightroom takes advantage of it, that that's my main tool on my 8740w.

Now with that said, keep this in mind. The bit-mode will not affect the range of colors [Gamut] the screen can produce, just the number of colors produced within the gamut. (I think I might put this in my sig) So what this is to say is don't confuse color gamut with the number of distinct steps of color, which is now over 1 billion with 3 channels at 10-bit. So you can still operate windows in Full/Native Gamut, AdobeRGB Gamut, or sRGB Gamut, all with 16.7 million distinct colors (8-bit), or the same gamuts with over a billion distinct colors (10-bit). In either instances (10 or 8 bit) the 'deepness?' of the color that can be shown will not change.

Have you seen my post showing the off-angle performance of the screen? (many pages back at this time) Post #2237: http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-e...ml#post6470413 When you consider that on any 17" in your lap or within reach of your arms and eyes you're looking at the corners at perhaps a 20 degree angle, the fact that this DC2 display has the viewing angle that it has makes the whole image on the screen more uniform and brilliant.

Yes, I have seen your pictures and have to say when I first saw them I said aloud to myself, "Holy Siht!" (feel free to correct my misspelling). I'd love to see more if you get a chance to post them. I am hopeful that many of the hardware related bugs, like the loss of the WinKey+Tab 3D will be fixed sooner rather than later, and that Aero support will be provided by ATI and/or HP in the same fashion.

If I am understanding you correctly, what this means is that the DC2 has a superior everyday viewing *display* (i.e. "gamut" of color reproduction) in terms of vibrancy, richness and range of colors compared to Dell's M6500 RGB, even in 8 bit mode, but that in 8 bit color mode its *stepping ability* to progress colors across its (superior) gamut is limited to the 8 bit version of 16.7 million steps vs 1 billion. Did I get that right? Notebookgrail, would you agree with this statement as well?

Yes DC2 has superior color to a extent. I do have a RGBLED screen in my office and i can say i like the DC2 much better. The real benefit comes in terms of viewing angle and true to color reproduction.

Have you found the DC2 to be more trouble-free or easy in terms of color calibration than its 8 bit kin?

On a mostly unrelated note, I wonder aloud if 10 bit color support may be better (e.g. no crashing and Aero support) when nVidia's Fermi workstation GPU becomes available for this notebook. Especially since they:
A) go through more testing and certification with their drivers.
B) have had a chance to observe HP/ATI's issues with the the 10 bit DC2
c) even their workstation drivers appear to be updated more frequently than ATIs

[nbr99]

Partitioning your drive won't protect you from hardware failure and if you're reinstalling the app anyway, what's the point? Most settings in modern apps are stored in your user folder, just back that up.

I agree with lethial. I make separate partitions on all my computers. And it's not about gaining a performance or protecting from hardware failure. Not at all. At some point you will want to reinstall OS. And placing OS on a separate partition makes it considerably easier.

Yes, indeed some programs require re-installation. They highly depend on registry. Many others are not. I've converted many of programs into utilities that reside on my Data drive all the time. They don't use registry or even, if some use, they can easily survive when they discover that there is nothing in the registry when you run them first time after installing OS on OS partition. Many developers offer a portable version for their program - I always take that package (that doesn't require installation, just unpack a simple ZIP file)... Just look for them, if you are interested, and you can find a lot of offers...

Second, to access all those utilities I use my toolbars (actually - three) that I keep, as you may guess, on the Data drive too. So, after I re-install OS - I just add those toolbars and here we go - all shortcuts, that I've created for them long time ago, are in place and ready to start those utilities again. So, I back to environment that I used to very quickly... And because they're organized using nested subfolders - I have quick access to all of them

Third, I use two completely different strategies to backup those two partitions. I backup small OS partition as a whole image, while I backup Data drive with file synchronization software that finds only files that were changes during the time since the last backup. I backup OS once in one or two months, while the Data partition is backed up every week.

Again, it all depends on the way how you organize your computer. And I found that the only way for me to do it effectively is to make separate partition for OS and Data.

[NotebookGrail]

Have you found the DC2 to be more trouble-free or easy in terms of color calibration than its 8 bit kin?

I haven't calibrated the DC2 yet, waiting for a deal on the HP calibration kit.

On a mostly unrelated note, I wonder aloud if 10 bit color support may be better (e.g. no crashing and Aero support) when nVidia's Fermi workstation GPU becomes available for this notebook. Especially since they:
A) go through more testing and certification with their drivers.
B) have had a chance to observe HP/ATI's issues with the the 10 bit DC2
c) even their workstation drivers appear to be updated more frequently than ATIs

Time will tell. But, i doubt as according to HP (Greg), they both go thru HP's testing and certification process. nVidia, on its part has much more than ATI.