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HP HP Pavillion
Reviews Views Date of last review
1 80325 09-09-2008
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Recommended By Average Price Average Rating
100% of reviewers $760.00 8.0
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Description: HP Pavilion dv2940se Special Edition
Turion 64 X2 TL-62 2.1GHz dual core
4GB RAM
320GB HDD
14.1" "glossy" Display, 1280x800 resolution
Nvidia 7150 Graphics
Builtin Bluetooth
Builtin Webcam (driver: uvcvideo), Microphone
Builtin Broadcom Wireless and Ethernet
Firewire input (not yet tried)
"Expansion Port" (not tried)
3 USB ports
VGA out (works in both/LCD only and external only mode)
"Supermulti" DVD Writer w/ Lightscribe, only tried for reading so far, specs say "reads/writes DVD±R/RW, DVD-RAM, DVD+R Double Layer, CD-R/RW"
Modem (not tried yet)
SD card slot (works, tried with 8G card)
Remote control that can be stowed in a slot on the side (works)
Alps touchpad with the slider field, emulates a scroll wheel
The outer surface shows some imprinted graphics, looks very nice and stylish, but all HP's with the shiny dark surface tend to show fingerprints.

I bought this machine because of the price (paid ~$760 after a rebate), the comprehensive lineup of inputs (Webcam/ USB/ Bluetooth/ Firewire/ SD card...) and because I had good experiences with AMD processors. 4G Ram and 320G disk seemed too good to pass up. Nothing except the Broadcom wireless chipset raised any warning flags (little did I know).

I do have the machine working and all is fine. That said, if you want to stop reading here, do yourself a favor and wait a few weeks before you buy this machine (a good amount of my struggles have nothing to do with the machine per se but with the fact that it's very new, support will certainly become better), or wait for a good deal for the new DV4 series (I think the closest match is called 1020US or so, it was available briefly for ~$50 more than this one), which has Intel CPUs and a better supported Atheros wireless chipset).

I initially put 64-Bit Kubuntu 8.04.x (.1? forgot) on. Normally I run Gentoo, but I wanted to get going quickly. Installation worked flawlessly.

But then I struggled endlessly to make suspend/resume work. I never succeeded in Ubuntu. Suspends alright, but doesn't wake up. Needs a hard reset. This is one of the most important features for me, no go.

Also, I could not make the Broadcom-proprietary "wl" Linux wireless driver work with WPA encryption. Doesn't connect. I could google lots of reports of this issue. Tried ndiswrapper, but since I couldn't get the suspend (or hibernate for that matter) to work, I gave up on Ubuntu at this point and switched to Gentoo, which I'm much more familiar with.

64-bit Gentoo came on next. With the current standard 2.6.25-gentoo-r7 kernel, the suspend seemed to work out of the box. I then enabled the same "wl" wireless driver as in Ubuntu. Works somewhat, except when you use WPA, the machine freezes, 100% reproducible, needs a hard reset. (It made me think that perhaps WPA doesn't work in Ubuntu for a reason, maybe it's disabled b/c of this?). Fell back to ndiswrapper, and that works. (The particular chipset is listed as not supported by the open-source drivers.)

Next problem was that the touchpad seemed to generate random clicks (had the same issue in Ubuntu, but wrote if off as the wrong "feel" for the new touchpad then). I had to change the driver to
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
in the "Inputdevice" section in the xorg.conf. If you do that, you get full support for the pad, including the side-slider emulating a scroll wheel. That driver has a large number of options that you can add to your xorg.conf; if you add

Option "SHMConfig" "1"

you can dynamically tweak the parameters with synclient until you have just the right acceleration, tap intensity, etc, and then put the values back into xorg.conf to make them persistent. The touchpad is now rock-solid.

I then noticed that all USB devices, including Bluetooth and the webcam, were dead, reproducibly, after a resume. While they work alright after an actual boot, a "lsusb" seemed to take forever. After seeing some chatter on the kernel mailing list about issues the ohci and ehci drivers, I played with lots of kernel versions, until I found that the (at the time of this writing) stable vanilla kernel 2.6.26.3 works best with the USB chipsets.

To my horror, with this kernel, the resume problem was back. In X, black frozen screen, hard reset required. In a console, I noticed that the suspend would abort. Traced the problem to a message "Class suspend failed for gart0" in the syslog. To make a long story short, the problem is with the 4G RAM which is not recognized properly in some MMU or other. Solution was to add "mem=4G" to the boot parameters. Here's my grub section:

title GNU/Linux 2.6.26.3
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26.3 root=/dev/sda1 ro agp=off acpi_sleep=s3_bios mem=4G

(I'm wondering if this would cure the Ubuntu resume problem, too?)

With this setting, all works. All of it took *a lot* more time than I had anticipated. I'd guess that in 6 weeks or so, all those "new model" problems will be addressed.

Despite some reviews saying otherwise (
http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/hp-p...-33108933.html) I find the machine fast and responsive and it "handles" well. With the 14.1" widescreen, the machine is small enough to fit in small bag. Webcam has good quality.

Two built-in microphones in the upper frame are nice; they are getting switched off if you plug an external microphone in (front connectors take some getting used to, I'd prefer them on the side). 2 headphone outputs are nice if you want to share the audio.

Blue-ish illuminated "soft-touch" media buttons above the function keys work (mostly, there's a "DVD" button and another button in a section called "Quickplay" that don't do anything as far as I can tell.) You have backward/play/forward/stop that do the right thing, and mute, and a soft-touch volume slider.

Now that I'm done wrestling with the basics: nice machine. I hope that the issues I listed get addressed soon.
Keywords: DV2940SE Special Edition
/sbin/lspci output: 00:00.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation Device 0547 (rev a2)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation Device 0548 (rev a2)
00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation Device 0542 (rev a2)
00:01.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation Device 0541 (rev a2)
00:01.3 Co-processor: nVidia Corporation Device 0543 (rev a2)
00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation Device 055e (rev a2)
00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation Device 055f (rev a2)
00:04.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation Device 055e (rev a2)
00:04.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation Device 055f (rev a2)
00:06.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation Device 0560 (rev a1)
00:07.0 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP67 High Definition Audio (rev a1)
00:08.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation Device 0561 (rev a2)
00:09.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation Device 0550 (rev a2)
00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: nVidia Corporation Device 054c (rev a2)
00:0c.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation Device 0563 (rev a2)
00:0d.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation Device 0563 (rev a2)
00:12.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Device 0531 (rev a2)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:09.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 05)
01:09.1 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 22)
01:09.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd Device 0843 (rev 12)
01:09.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 12)
01:09.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev 12)
04:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4310 USB Controller (rev 01)


Author
Post A Reply 
Old 09-09-2008, 10:42 AM   #1
mlp68
 
Registered: Jun 2002
Distribution: Gentoo,RH
Posts: 328

Rep: Reputation:
Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid? (in USD): $760.00 | Rating: 8

Kernel (uname -r): 2.6.26.3
Distribution: Gentoo 64bit



I put lots of details into the kick-off post already. I have meanwhile tested the firewire input and I can talk to my camcorder alright. So all interfaces (which were a big selling point for me) work. Ok, modem remains untried.
 




  



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