HP silent on glitch with Core i7-based Elite Pavilion PCs

i5 boards are dodgy too

I bought an i5 motherboard kit recently which suffered the same effects, bsod's, usb problems etc. The replacement is ok but it seems they've screwed up somewhere.

years ago same thing happened with the Dell Inspiron line.

Hardware builders need to learn not to put crappy low quality parts on motherboards PERIOD!

We are tired of seeing blown caps.

Tired of seeing caps sitting close to the CPU so they are always in a cooked state.

Tired of seeing the network interface upside down so close to the case only a needle nose

can pry the plug out. Or you may have to call your 7 year old over and let their agile finger take it out.

Also tired of PC case vendors who never make the right holes for high quality power packs. instead only make holes for low quality power packs and we must drill or tape the power pack to the case to keep it still.

I am still in love with the Antec 900 case but want to fire the guys who designed the part for the hard drive on the same Antec 900 case... Guys.... were yo usmoking crack or loved the idea of blood dripping on motherboards?

The Dell Inspiron laptop I had was the 5100 and it was the first laptop to use a regular

desktop CPU which meant way too much overheating. IT BENT MY MEMORY CHIP!

Grrrr.

HP has support?

last time I dealt with HP support, I was getting a laptop touchpad fixed (left button stopped working). I also needed the admin bios password cleared. I got the laptop back with a working touchpad and a reformatted hard drive. The guy on the phone had assured me that the hard drive would not be touched. bunch of lying bastards they are. Needless to say I have refused to buy anything with HP/Compaq stamped on it even if it is the best deal at the time.

HP would do well actually allowing users to keep the hard drive and just send in the laptop (but no, it's against their policy to actually work on something that isn't complete). I would have backed it up in the first place if the support grunt on the phone hadn't assured me (more than a few times mind you) that there would be no formatting. HP can rot in Hell for all I care.

HP issues - or should I say ANY quad core CPU issues

Their are two fixes to this problem, neither of which HP is fessing up to.

1) A quad core processor cannot run correctly in a system with only 1 hard drive, the CPU, memory, and subsystem is just to fast, which results in lockups and slow downs all the time.

The system was shipped with a Raid controller, use it, purchase another hard drive (or 2) of the same size or larger, set up a RAID, Raid 1 is preferred as it is about 50% faster in access time.

However, Raid 0 will work OK and eliminate the lockups. The on board controller will not support Raid 5, so if you want to use this you will have to purchase an aftermarket controller.

Regular backups are still REQUIRED, so purchase an external hard drive or make backup DVD's on a regular basis.

The 1st hard drive should be on SATA port 1, the second on SATA port 2, the third hard drive on port 3, DVD/CD should be on ports 5 and 6 - no exceptions.

2) Cabling appears to be incorrect in these systems. The first 3 sata channels on the system board were designed for a RAID array, since you only have one hard drive, the system get's confused.

Fix: Requires are reload of the system in ALL cases

a) go into the BIOS and change the Sata controller settings, to IDE NOT RAID (this is default), or simply use any setting other than RAID - be sure this is saved.

b) move the DVD/CD rom drive connectors to sata channel 5 and./or 6

c) disable sata (S-IDE) channel 2 and 3 (and any other one you are not using) in the bios.

Also disable P - IDE channels if you are not using them.

d) Reload the machine using the restore CD's

e) Immediately after reloading - load ALL Microsoft and HP updates for your machine, this is MANDATORY, and not an option.

f) Load anti-virus and Anti-spyware software (Norton and McAfee are NOT recommended for Vista - they simply do not work well in a 64 bit O/S).

I would suggest Kaspersky's or AVG for anti-virus, these seem to have the least problems

For Anti-spyware, use Spybot Search and Destroy, Spysweeper, Malwarebytes anti-malware or other recognized known programs.

3) Their are timing issues with Seagate SATA hard drives in these systems. Either get the flash upgrade for these hard drives (version 7200.11 or lower), replace the drive a newer model, or with a different brand of hard drive. Seagate is fessing up to this issue in forums.

This appears to affect faster machines more often than slower ones. The faster the system is the worse it is on the hard drive.

WD Cheetah drives also have timing issues, and require a reboot every 49 days. This is a known issue. So be aware of this. WD blue/green hard drives are significantly slower than Seagate drives in the same systems are NOT recommended due to high failure rates.

Fujitsu, does not appear to have any hard drive issues.

Samsung does not appear to have any issues with hard drives - these tend to be slow but reliable.

Hitachi/IBM have some timing issues also related to firmware - this is dependent on system speed and controller used.

I have to ask

but has anyone tried running Linux on one of these?

@HP issues - or should I say ANY quad core CPU issues

"1) A quad core processor cannot run correctly in a system with only 1 hard drive, the CPU, memory, and subsystem is just to fast, which results in lockups and slow downs all the time."

Bollocks. Are you seriously saying that the system locks up when accessing the drive interface?? Your completely inaccurate statement is typical of PC-weanies who obviously don't understand performance problems.

"The system was shipped with a Raid controller, use it, purchase another hard drive (or 2) of the same size or larger, set up a RAID, Raid 1 is preferred as it is about 50% faster in access time."

Again, complete and utter bollocks. RAID1 can theoretically provide higher bandwidth but latency is increased due to multilple head settling times - particularly on SATA drives which don't do head-settling as well as SAS or SCSI disks (and even IDE!) so access time is increased. Perhaps you're getting confused with service time and access time. Even service time is not guaranteed to increase unless you're using large sequential IO and if you're running Windows, NTFS precludes that due to it's incredibly inefficient block allocation "algorithms".

Can't comment on the cabling as I wouldn't touch HP kit with yours!

@AC#2 - You are high

Where do you get this super secret information and why doesn't it apply to me?

I have a Quad and one Hitachi HD and i rarely reboot. I'm using Kubuntu 9.04 with kslpice since May so I don't even have to reboot after kernel updates. No problems here for the last couple years.