Do I hate HP, Vista, or Walmart?

May 20, 2008 4:24 PM

Tell me i didnt waste $1,060 on this laptop

This is one of the saddest things thats ever happened to me regarding technology.

Long story short, I bought an HP Pavilion tx1417cl laptop/tablet last month. I managed to buy the display model from Walmart thinking it was a great computer. Little did I know the return period was 15 days!!! The sales lady told me it was 30, and I, of course, never checked the receipt.

The screen is too shiney to use in normal circumstances, the touch screen is super unresponsive, and it came loaded with both a ton of useless HP nonsense that eats up memory, and worst of all Windows Vista.

Since it was the display model, it had a bunch of stuff done to it that i didnt set up. I decided (after I couldnt return it) to format it, and start over from the recovery image. This was an even worse mistake apparently...

The damn thing now runs so slow, my 4 year old XP laptop puts it to shame. I can barely load web pages much less anything data intensive. This is without any new software installed at all!!

What the heck is going on?

HELP me figure out how to do any of the following:
- Get rid of this computer without losing too much money!
- Speed up Windows Vista enough to make me feel like 'hey! i can do things easier on this laptop than I could before I owned it!'
- Revert to Windows XP or maybe even Linux but still be able to use the features that made this damn thing cost so much!

posted by ZackTM to technology (28 comments total)

Some specs on the HP Pavilion tx1417cl for those wishing to answer the last two questions:

# Processor Speed: 2.00GHz
# Cache: 512KB+512KB L2 Cache
# Bus Speed: Up to 1600MHz system bus running at AC/DC Mode 35 watt
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce Go 7150M (UMA) (6) with up to 799MB Total Available Graphics Memory
# 2048MB DDR2 System Memory (2 Dimm)
# 250GB (5400RPM) Hard Drive (SATA)

FWIW, I downgraded to XP recently on a machine slightly slower than yours. Vista requires a lot of hog -- hog that I didn't have, and I've been mostly happy with the downgrade. That's probably the best option for you in this situation.
posted by nitsuj at 4:31 PM on May 20, 2008

start over from the recovery image. This was an even worse mistake apparently...

The damn thing now runs so slow, my 4 year old XP laptop puts it to shame. I can barely load web pages much less anything data intensive.

My guess would be that the recovery image includes all the crapware the computer came with.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 4:32 PM on May 20, 2008

All is not lost, the hardware is OK

Buyer beware. Get a copy of XP tablet. Most/All of the drivers will be available for that PC.

Did you turn it on before you bought it? That would have saved you the "Oh No, it's got Vista" experience.
posted by mattoxic at 4:40 PM on May 20, 2008 [1 favorite]

I'd suggest checking out the notebookreview.com forums. I've mostly only looked at the Dell forums there, but they generally have good instructions on how to do a clean install (with zero bloatware), as well as advice on performance tuning in general.
posted by dixie flatline at 4:40 PM on May 20, 2008

The damn thing now runs so slow, my 4 year old XP laptop puts it to shame.

My four-year-old Acer Centrino laptop runs faster than my new Core 2 Duo Dell notebook. The reason? RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM.

Why not take it to a shop, spend 100 bucks and get it fixed up?
posted by KokuRyu at 4:40 PM on May 20, 2008

Build your own Windows image.
posted by semi at 4:41 PM on May 20, 2008

Vista should run fine on that machine. It runs perfectly on my 1.4ghz notebook w/ 2gigs of ram.

I suggest a clean install as everyone else has suggested.
posted by wongcorgi at 4:45 PM on May 20, 2008

About the touchpad, I don't know why but it seems like HP loves going cheap on those. It's one of the primary interfaces to the machine, you use it all the time. But they put these shitty things in there that are sheer pain to use, made me completely hate my computer. I used an external mouse whenever possible, and replaced my HP with a more upscale laptop shortly afterward.
posted by knave at 4:47 PM on May 20, 2008

Wal-Mart usually has an exceptional return policy. If you really want to return it, I would encourage you to pursue it wholeheartedly. Ask to speak to the store manager. Point to the sign that says Satisfaction Guaranteed. Mention the misinformation you were given previously. Threaten to call and complain to the district manager, or to 1-800-WAL-MART. Follow through with the threats if need be.
posted by kidbritish at 5:08 PM on May 20, 2008

There's no reason to hate on Vista. Nthing a clean install.
posted by phunniemee at 5:09 PM on May 20, 2008 [1 favorite]

In the short term, you can disable Aero Glass, which will make Vista about as fast as XP. In the long term, the recovery disk will probably have all the crapware that it already does, so that doesn't help much. You can, however, remove said crapware manually.

If you plan to use the tablet stuff, you might as well stick with Vista. You won't be able to easily get a legitimate copy of XP Tablet without paying significantly more money. I have Vista on two tablets, and am reasonably happy with it.

2 GB RAM should be sufficient.

The shiny screen, not much you can do about that. The touch screen shouldn't be unresponsive, but it probably requires that you use the stylus that comes with the computer. Most tablet screens aren't truly "touch" screens, they require a special stylus.

Frankly, if you're not going to use the tablet functionality, you should probably ditch it in favor of something without that. Tablets are generally bigger and slower.
posted by me & my monkey at 5:16 PM on May 20, 2008

I would say that hating Vista is a reasonable position to take, but I don't think you should focus entirely on Vista. I happen to own a Mac Mini, HP Tower running Vista, a laptop running XP Pro, an old HP Tower running Ubuntu and my wife has an HP laptop running Vista. Each operating system has its advantages and disadvantages (that's why I run different ones) but I think I can fairly say that Microsoft made cosmetic improvements to create Vista, but at the same time lost most of the stability and quality of XP, delivering on balance a poor experience for the average user. The programmers I work with agree on this point.

So in summary I'm saying that I see HP machines as decent, Vista as poor but acceptable, and I have no experience with Walmart.
posted by forthright at 6:07 PM on May 20, 2008

Since it was the display model, it had a bunch of stuff done to it that i didnt set up. I decided (after I couldnt return it) to format it, and start over from the recovery image. This was an even worse mistake apparently...

You may not have the latest system device drivers in it; this can cause slowdowns and all kinds of weird behaviors. If you're determined to keep Vista, try systematically reinstalling every device driver in it, starting with the video driver and tablet input driver.

However, IMO Vista will continue to give you problems as time goes by and the only way to solve that is to install XP or Ubuntu.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 6:42 PM on May 20, 2008

I used this (granted, my new PC came out when XP was still the default, thank goodness) - PC Decrapifier.
posted by citron at 6:43 PM on May 20, 2008

The computer should still be under warranty with HP. That should, at least, enable you to get them to fix replace the faulty touchpad.
posted by oddman at 6:55 PM on May 20, 2008

I'm sure people are going to yell at me for this.
posted by flabdablet at 7:46 PM on May 20, 2008

Buying the display model wasn't a good idea, but otherwise if you throw some RAM in there it should be fine. I have a similar model and with more RAM, it runs like a dream.
posted by k8t at 8:52 PM on May 20, 2008

The damn thing already has two frickin dual channel gigabytes. How much RAM can Vista possibly waste?
posted by flabdablet at 9:23 PM on May 20, 2008

I haven't used PC Decrapifier, but I've heard good things about it.

I got my wife's Vista ultraportable to run OK by turning off all unnecessary services and startup programs, indexing etc. You could try the guidelines on this site, I can't remember if that's what I used but the advice looks similar. A lot of people seem to have noticed an improvement after turning off SuperFetch and this was true for me. If a big part of your problem is excessive disk access on startup then it's definitely worth a try.

Some people also reported that installing service pack 1 for Vista made things faster.
posted by tomcooke at 12:43 AM on May 21, 2008

"Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce Go 7150M (UMA) (6) with up to 799MB Total Available Graphics Memory"

There's half your problem. Integrated graphics can use some amount of system memory as video memory. Three problems result: First, sharing system memory is slow, compared to the dedicated VRAM of desktop video card solutions. Like, maybe, half or one third the speed of the best VRAM. Second, shared memory contends with the system CPU(s) for memory bandwidth, somewhere, sometime. OK, clever caching strategies, and cache management, and pipelining of the memory controllers, and async tricks with the integrated video chipset have mitigated this second issue a lot since the bad old days of first generation integrated video. What used to suck sweaty donkey balls, now just plain sucks. Third, in most integrated video schemes, shared system memory you set aside for video, is subtracted from the system memory pool. If you've got 512 MB of shared memory reserved in BIOS for video memory, trying to make Vista's Aero GUI work, you've only got 1.5 GB left for Vista, which is not good enough to keep it from swapping out to virtual memory a lot, especially with a Duo CPU.

So, definitely kill Aero. No chance that video pig Vista GUI is going to run well on this machine. In BIOS, cut your video memory to something like 64 MB, max, to use only the dedicated VRAM on the GeForce chipset, so that your system can use the machine memory for Vista, not video. Cut your video color depth to 16 bit, too, to further speed up screen redraws and unload your video hardware and memory. Run only your native display screen resolution, so your screen hardware isn't trying to interpolate resolution constantly. Consider cutting down interface animation like zooming, and smooth scrolling. 64 MB of VRAM isn't nifty, even for 16 bit color at 1024 x 768 resolution, if you're doing lots of animation redraws for every mouse gesture. That could be half your complaint about your touch screen sensitivity, too. It takes extra time to resolve interface features, if your touch screen has to wait on redraw to finish and settle, before it can poll for control update.

Next, that 5400 rpm hard drive is pretty slow. A hundred bucks spent on a 7200 RPM drive could make operation noticeably snappier.
posted by paulsc at 1:44 AM on May 21, 2008

Couldn't hurt to try the latest Ubuntu live CD - it works like a dream on my thinkpad tablet.
posted by primer_dimer at 2:41 AM on May 21, 2008

First off: no, you didn't waste your money on that laptop. Arguably your money could have been better spent, but this is definitely salvageable (without spending money!), depending on how much time and effort you are willing to put into tweaking your system.

First, yes, if there are physical hardware problems you should most definitely send it in to get serviced by HP.

Second, I'm not sure how experienced you are with computers, but Vista has MANY "Services" that eat up resources and are completely unnecessary: You can consult this absolutely exhaustive site (BlackViper.com) for instructions.

Third, you can easily get rid of overhead by disabling those HP programs that came preloaded. That's as simple as going Start>Run>msconfig and unchecking some Startup items.

Fourth, there are other things you can disable, like the Indexing Service or the User Account Control (which is a joke) which can streamline your experience and make it much more friendly overall.

Good luck.
posted by tybeet at 6:55 AM on May 21, 2008

Can anyone recommend anything for the screen?

That seriously is my biggest problem. It is ridiculous that I can actually see my reflection in my computer screen when I'm just sitting in my office.
posted by ZackTM at 6:57 AM on May 21, 2008

"Can anyone recommend anything for the screen?"

Unfortunately, anything you apply to the screen is going to negatively affect its use as a tablet and as a touch device. Meaning, "stop it working for those functions, altogether." You could probably just hook it up to a cheap external LCD screen, however, for standard work. A 15" LCD can be had pretty reasonably these days...
posted by paulsc at 7:06 AM on May 21, 2008

I'll second the recommendation to try installing video card drivers. If it's sluggish even at tasks like dragging windows around the screen and scrolling, that's almost certainly your problem. (FWIW, I'm running Vista right now on a laptop with integrated graphics and 1GB of RAM, and I can say that Aero is slow but very usable with that level of hardware.)

As for the screen, is it really touch-sensitive, or does it only respond to the tablet pen? If the latter, then it's almost certainly using a Wacom sensor below the actual display. In that case, you should be able to apply any kind of anti-glare filter or coating without affecting the sensor. Just don't use anything electrically conductive and it'll be fine.
posted by teraflop at 7:57 AM on May 21, 2008

What kind of anti-glare filters/coating are available for a laptop? I've only seen the sorta thick screens that hang off monitors.
posted by ZackTM at 10:21 AM on May 21, 2008

Just return the thing. Put it back in the box and get it to Wal-Mart before the 30 days is up. It won't really help your case if you say to them, "Kathy the sales lady said 30 days" and they look at the calendar and say, "Sir, it's been 32 days."

Simply put, they don't want trouble, and if you explain it calmly but firmly to the store manager (if necessary) they should give you your money back.
posted by explosion at 11:46 AM on May 21, 2008

3M makes anti-glare screen protectors for tablet PCs under the name "Vikuiti". Here's a positive review, but I have found some negative reviews as well - it seems to be largely a matter of taste.
posted by tomcooke at 1:42 AM on May 22, 2008