HP ENVY 17-2070NR Notebook Computer - Silver

Well, this is my first time doing a review on here, but becuase of how few reviews I have been able to find on this laptop, I figured I should share my thoughts on it.

First off, the packaging was amazing! You can tell they really took their time when designing the way this product would be shipped and opened for first use.

The look and feel of this laptop is also really good. It feels really strong and not made out of some cheap materials. I love how it comes with ZERO stickers on the laptop that display what is it in. The laptop is very sleek and clean looking. I also love the custom theme that it is for Windows 7. It is also very simple and clean. It is a LOT better than the default windows 7 theme. The keyboard is also very well made and I love the backlighting.

However, this amazing laptop also has some flaws that I wish I knew about BEFORE purchasing this item. I had no idea that the other Envy products (Envy 15 for example), suffer from black or blank screen problems! At random (normally when the computer is sitting without being used for a short time) the screen will just fade to black. If you look really hard from certain angles you can see the desktop, but its so dark you cannot shut down the computer. This also happens nearly 100% of the time when you close the screen and return to your computer after a short time. From what I have read online, the only "fix" for this is to close the screen again or hold the power button until it restarts. Also, HP does not seem to see this has a problem with the computer, however just google HP envy 17 Black Screen and you will see all the issues people are having with this. HP just seems to replace the computers. Hopefully a fix will come out soon, but nobody can seem to figure out what causes this issue.

Another problem I have been having is the random freezing. I will be doing nothing no downloads, no music playing, just simply sitting at the desktop and the computer will freeze. Again, the only fix for this is to hold down the power button until it turns off. Also, this issue is like the black screen problem. I have not found anybody that has been able to pinpoint the cause of this problem to get it fixed.

Finally, the last problem is the heat! Man does this thing produce heat. It could heat up a house in the winter! With only ONE vent in the side of the computer that is in a really poor location, this thing is hard to cool down. I had to purchase a massive cooling pad to help keep it cool. Also, the place that seems to heat up the worst is to the left of the mousepad (which sucks as well) which if you are a gamer, that is not a good location. You will be resting your palm here to use the WASD keys for many of the games and your hand will get extremely hot.

Overall, I really want to like this computer, but with the issue I am having, I don't know if I will be keeping it or returning it to Amazon. If I can figure out a fix for the random black screens or freezes, I will keep it since I can deal with the heat now that it has a pad. However, the random freezing and the black screens are a deal breaker for a laptop that costs SO much money. You would think that since the black screen problem was a major issue with the Envy 15 that they would have fixed it for the Envy 17, but like I said, HP does not seem to see this as a problem.

EDIT: Well I have been dealing with HP support through e-mail and they are being anything but helpful at this point. Sure they reply to e-mails EXTREMELY fast for such a major company, but you can tell all their answers are canned replies that have already been typed and they simply copy and paste. For example, in the last e-mail from them, they gave me the instructions to do something on my computer for Windows XP...did they even check to see what the heck the laptop was?!?! Does HP even have laptops that have XP on them anymore? So far, after three e-mail messages and tons of research online, none of the problems I mentioned in the first review have been fixed. Buy at your own risk, but HP doesn't seem to understand the problems people are having with this machine.

Out of the box this machine is extraordinary, The packaging alone tells you, you just bought a different type of laptop(very high end) perfectly packed with a couple of very nice extras(nothing big but I won't spoil the surprise)if you like bells and whistles this laptop has them all, aluminum case and the look of the etching is incredible and feels really solid (which is very good, having seen broken or bent motherboards and screens due to flimsy cases) beautiful LED screen, chicklet type illuminated keys, slot load BD player, extra long lasting battery...the works. Ok performance. Turning it on I was amazed by how quick this machine is and I have been around PCs and laptops all teen-adult life so I can tell you, you won't be disappointed. specs are up on the product description, but they are MISSING the best parts. This is a new i7 2.0 GHz processor (CPU) and it is quad core (4 CPU in one) BUT! with "hyper-threading" so if you don't speak geek what it means is that you virtually have (and you will see in your task manager) 8 (eight) 2.0 GHz processors running simultaneously this is awesome. Now to me the most important missing spec is that this is a HM65 chipset, what this means is that it comes available with blazing fast SATA 3 hard drive interface..in all my latest laptops this has been the performance bottleneck even with an SSD hard drive (downside, the laptop comes with 2 500Gb SATA 2 Hard drives. upside they come in RAID 0(you will see just one big disk on your explorer), which is a lot faster than normal setups.)but if you want the extra performance of SATA 3 you will have to buy a new HD. Last thing it has great battery life due to the double video card, so, on power saver, low performance video card and dimmed screen, I can get up to 3 hrs with the 6 cell battery. OK for us geeks that can't leave well enough alone...the laptop comes with 4gb + 2Gb RAM very bad! so BUY 8Gb RAM package and a SSD HD that is SATA 3 compatible (and a SSUSB (or USB 3.0) external enclosure to put the extra HD once your done), you will have to do a new windows install so download your drivers from HP except the SSUSB this one download it from a HP probook which is the same driver but newer and better (don't know why), and an updated video driver...I can't start to tell you how fast this machine turns out! by now you can see that I like computers, this one blew mi mind and I haven't over clocked it yet...hope this helps...long winded and all.

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I just got the HP 2070NR to use as a development work station. So far I've been extremely happy with the purchase.

I have my 2070 running XUbuntu 11.04 AMD64. There were a few quirks specific to this laptop (that will probably effect anyone using Linux on it regardless of distro), one of which is the "click-pad" and the other of which is the hybrid graphics card. I had to patch and build a new package to get the track pad working correctly, but it wasn't really a big deal so I'm not deducting a star for it. You can find that answer on bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/582809 (#144). The other thing is you don't want to use fglrx (proprietary drivers) on it, as fglrx does not work with vgaswitcheroo (the Linux kernel facility for switching graphics cards) yet... I'm sure AMD will come out with a fix for it eventually, but for the moment only the opensource radeon drivers work.

Other than fglrx not working and the touchpad behaving weird, everything on this laptop worked out of the box on Ubuntu (wireless, wired network card, sound, even the web cam).

One thing I wanted to note about the two hard drives is they come configured in a Raid0 configuration and the array controller only supports Raid0 (no raid1/mirrored). I had kind of been hoping to mirror my hard drives with a hardware controller... But that isn't really a big deal either because what other laptop comes with 2 hard drives and an array controller?

I'm really happy with this laptop so far. I've had it for 3 days now, and it's definitely a huge step up over my previous laptop. I can run Netbeans, Eclipse, Jboss, Banshee, and a VirtualBox without any problems... This laptop had everything I was looking for in a laptop specs wise, and then some.

As far as battery life:

If you use the 6-cell battery, and aren't doing anything too intense, it should get close to 2 hours.

If you use the 9-cell battery and aren't doing anything too computationally intense, it'll be closer to 3.5.a)

That isn't really amazing battery life for a laptop, but when you consider what a monster this thing is, 17 in display, 2x 7200 RPM drives, i7 quad, discreet graphics, it does a bit better than what I'd expect. I have to give them credit, they built a machine designed to behave much like a desktop, and it still has a usable battery.

As far as build quality goes:

I've always been an HP fan, but I've always hated the pavilion and other home computers. I've always bought the business laptops and workstations. I have to say, HP has addressed a lot of the problems I've had with the pavilions and some of their other home computers being crappy computers. This computer is built like one of their business models, and not only that it's really nice looking. It performs really well, has great hardware, and was at a much more desirable price point than some of their other offerings.

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Very, very well packaged. The unit is very sleek and it runs very quietly. Backlit Keyboard was just what I wanted. Very good. The Display was great.

But upon first use, this unit would freeze up and not respond to any commands. I had to turn the power off using the Power Button. Then upon turning it on again it would run for a few hours (or sometimes a only few minutes) then freeze up again. I had to recycle the power button to get it back on.

HP Customer Service was very courteous (and they spoke English). I talked with them 4 or 5 times in the first fews days after receiving the PC, they seemed to know what they were doing and I got the same department each time I called. They even called ME back to see how I was doing. (The technicians I spoke with knew the other technicians I had spoken to, so I didn't have to keep explaining the problem over and over again)

But everything we tried failed to fix the problem. HP finally suggested returning the unit. Thinking the problem was hardware vs. software.

I did send the unit back to Amazon. Amazon offered me an exchange or my money back. Amazon has good customer service also.

So if you get a unit that freezes up at any time, make sure you call HP for help. They told me this was not an uncommon problem but new HP BIOS usually fixes the bug. (They also said my unit may have set on the shelf for a while, and that newer units come with the newer version BIOS)

HP Customer Service was the BEST customer support I have ever had to use.. too bad the unit wasn't as good..

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Hp Envy 17-2070nr. So far I believe its an amazing laptop. Havent had a single problem, its extremely fast and it came flawless. Hopefully I will not have any problems in the future but if I do I will update.

It did took me a few minutes to get used to the trackpad, but got used to it.

I was afraid of buying because I could not find any reviews but I am glad I took the risk.

edit:

I had some issues with it freezing, supposedly the culprit was the wireless card, but I simply did a clean install of Windows 7 from the partition recovery, and the problem seems to be fixed. i brought it down to four because i shouldn't have to be fixing a brand new computer specially a 1400 dollar computer, but i did because i really love the feel and performance of the computer.