@kenhirai83: You're running HWMonitor 1.16. If you download 1.17, the GPU heat data should appear, and the battery data should disappear.

@thieflord: Don't have that game. Not sure if want.

This post has been edited by ThisIsBoletaria: May 3 2011, 10:13 PM

@Vox: If you have Norton on your system, that's always the first thing I would assume is responsible for any lag on the system. After removing Norton, I don't experience the same amount of system lag when copying over data from an external hard drive, for example, and my office notebook ran so much faster once IT learnt the error of their ways and used something else aside from Norton, even if it is some weird AV like Panda Antivirus. Norton is so notorious for this that they had to put out an advertorial to 'educate' the public that their AV actually uses the least system resources and so on a few years back, but anyone who's ever used Norton and compared it to other AVs before knows what's up.


Seriously, download AVGFree and replace Norton with it. See if it helps.

This post has been edited by ThisIsBoletaria: May 4 2011, 06:55 AM

@Vox: Some things to try out:

1) Defrag your hard drive.

2) Restore your system to stock using the Recovery CDs you made.

3) Sue HP.

Defragment your hard drive. This is basically getting a program to rearrange all the bits and bytes on your hard drive so that all the ones belonging to one file are strung together in sequence, instead of them being scattered all over the place (fragmented). A fragmented hard drive means slow performance when you access those files or programs because the hard drive has to rummage through the whole hard drive for them instead of reading it all in one go.

Windows has a built-in defragmenter, but it's awfully slow and your children will have grandchildren by the time it's done. I use Auslogics Disk Defrag, which is much much faster



Then I hope you haven't gotten rid of the recovery partition.

Start Menu -> Recovery Manager -> Recovery Manager. Choose "Restore to factory settings", which will restore everything to factory settings as if the notebook just came out of the box.

To make recovery cds, choose "Make Recovery DVDs" or something like that from the same program.


I personally think that you should try to do a factory reset first and see if the lag is still there. Might as well try everything before you go for tech support. Check to see if you have the lag before you install SF4; who knows, maybe there's malware in the crack if you got a Blackbeard ™ version, or it might just be a poorly written crack. Not just SF4; check before and after installing all your other programs as well.

This post has been edited by ThisIsBoletaria: May 5 2011, 01:16 PM

@SomaCruz89: Heat was my main concern as well. Apart from the warm area under the left palm which you do get used to when gaming, the dv6 handles heat very well.

This post has been edited by ThisIsBoletaria: May 6 2011, 07:29 PM

@Vox: Did you try the factory reset I suggested and checking if the lag existed before you started installing anything?

HP Software Framework is just some basic code shared by all the HP programs, and the BIOS update fixes an intermittent problem that some systems have with battery charging during idle. I don't think those two things would help with your lag, but it's worth installing anyway.

Even if they don't give the Beats headset for that price, the features of Full HD, BD drive and 1 TB HDD makes it well worth the price. A 1 TB HDD alone is about RM 500, which makes it maybe RM 150 more expensive than the 750 GB drives the 6001tx model has, and crazy-ass downloaders know just how much that extra 250 GB is worth.

This post has been edited by ThisIsBoletaria: May 11 2011, 09:38 PM

1) Copy and rename Windows 7 paint.exe to paint.exe.wav
2) Add paint.exe.wav to Winamp playlist
3) ???



This post has been edited by ThisIsBoletaria: May 13 2011, 12:02 PM

This information wasn't linked on the front page and even I was too lazy to find it through 60 pages of posts, so here we go.


Repartitioning your dv6's stock hard drive.

1) Get a free partitioning tool like MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition.

Yes, Windows 7 does have a disk partitioning tool built in (Right-click Computer -> Manage, Select Storage -> Disk Management), but because of how HP has kindly set up our HDDs, you will only be able to shrink your C: partition to a minimum of about 400-450GB only. A proper partitioning program will avoid this problem and allow you to partition as you like.

2) Plan your partitioning

One thing to note: Again, because of how HP has set up our HDDs, we will actually have 4 partitions:
- System (a hidden partition of about 200 MB)
- C:
- The recovery partition; and
- the HP_Tools partition.

Not necessary, but useful so you have an idea of how you will arrange your partitions. I split mine into a Windows drive (C ), a program installation drive (D) and a data drive (E). Separating your program installation drive and your system drive makes backups for the system drive smaller and faster to generate, plus it means you don't have to worry about installations fragmenting your Windows drive and affecting performance as often. Try to plan your partitions so that it looks like this:



3) Shrink your C: partition

I shrunk mine down to 60 GB to account for how some programs still insist on installing some data to your system drive even if you tell it to install elsewhere, and to provide space for swap files, update downloads and System Restore space.

Also, because some users have made this mistake and have everything stop working, do NOT change the partition type of C:. Leave it as primary, or your Windows will stop working and your partitioning program will simply fail to start when your computer reboots later.

4) Reallocate the free space

C:, System and HP_Tools are already primary partitions, and there is a restriction on the number of primary partitions that you can make on any one hard drive, which is exactly 3. This means that you will have to create any other drives as Logical drives.


Anyway, tl;dr:
1) Don't bother with the built-in partitioning program. It's designed to be safe and therefore limited in functionality. Use it only to change disk drive letters.

2) Get a third party partitioning program.

3) All new drives on the default hard disk should be logical drives because HP has already maximised the number of primary drives on the disk.

Also, make your recovery DVDs and then remove the recovery partition for extra space.



Repartitioning drive that has data on it without losing the data

Short answer: It can be done if you're careful, but try not to.

Long answer:

First, a short grounder on how partitioning programs work. Partitioning programs usually perform their operations in steps. If you want to resize your C drive, for example, first it will copy over all the information on the C drive to fit into the final drive size, and then it will reassign the drive size. This way, partitioning programs try to avoid data loss when shrinking partitions.

However, sometimes things can go wrong. For example, if the program asks you for a size in megabytes and your data is actually maybe a few kilobytes more than what you enter, you will lose those kilobytes. Good programs will catch this and warn you. Not so good programs will assume you know what you're doing.

So, to avoid potential data loss, follow these tips:

1) Never ever resize a partition to be smaller than the amount of data in it.

2) Never ever resize a partition to be smaller than the amount of data in it.

3) Give yourself some breathing space whenever you resize partitions with data in them, say, 5% - 10%. If Windows says you have 100 MB of data in that partition, don't resize it to anything less than, say 110 MB.


Breaking the rules

Let's say you screwed up and put in loads of data into your C: drive before deciding it's a good idea to partition off a data drive and make a smaller C: drive. All is not lost; you don't need to resign yourself to recopying all that data off from a USB hard drive. If you follow the previous tips, you can still actually pull it off.

1) Make a new partition that is as large as possible without making the original partition too small.

2) Move as much data as possible from the old partition into the new data partition.

3) Shrink the original partition again and merge the free space into the new partition. Your new partition should now be larger.

4) Repeat steps until your original partition is the size you want it to be.

5) Defragment both partitions, or at least the new data partition.

This is how I would do it if I was in that situation, but be warned: I'm not responsible for any data loss if you use this trick, so copy any irreplacable data into a backup USB hard drive before doing it. I would rather just take the more time-consuming path of recopying the data completely from a USB hard drive.

This post has been edited by ThisIsBoletaria: Jul 16 2011, 08:57 PM

Switching Off HP Action Keys

Action Keys is HP code for "let's take a standard keyboard layout and make the keys do things that people don't expect them to do". In the context of the dv6, this means that pressing F2 will cause the screen brightness to go down instead of, you know, triggering whatever command F2 is supposed to trigger normally, like Rename File. The dv6 has this enabled out of the box, and it can be very confusing. I don't know how many people actually like it, but I'm certainly not one of them, which is why I turned it off.

This is how I did it:
1) Reboot computer. Keep pressing the Escape button as the screen turns on. This will lead you to a screen with a few text options that look something like this:



I can't remember what the options are, so pick the one that leads to BIOS setup or similar.

2) Look for the option called Action Keys. It should be under either Advanced or Miscellaneous.

3) Set it to "Off" or "Disabled". If the option is called "Disable Action Keys", then obviously set it to "On" or "Enabled". The point is you want to turn Action Keys off; PMR level English will help you greatly here.

4) Go to the last screen of the BIOS menu and select "Exit and Save Changes". When prompted, choose "Yes". This will save the changes to your BIOS and reboot your computer.

And that's it: your function keys will now be accessible without pressing the Fn button, and the special functions are accessible by pressing Fn+F<whatever>. As it should be.

It may interest you to know that my hard drive (also the Samsung one) also suffered a huge slowdown out of stock whenever I tried to copy a lot of files from my external HDD to my internal HDD. Windows slowed down, everything slowed down. It was insane, but it sped back up as soon as the file copy was done. So, check these things first:

1) Are there any big files copying/downloading/torrenting? If there are, try stopping it first and see if your system speeds up.

2) Try defragging the hard drive. I use Auslogics Disk Defrag because it's bloody billions of times faster than the built-in Windows defragger. A fragmented hard drive (one where lots of files have pieces everywhere instead of being ordered in one sequential line) will always suffer slowdowns as the hard drive head will have to go everywhere instead of just following a simple line whenever it's reading or writing files.

3) Run Scandisk. Open Windows Explorer/My Computer, right click on your hard drive, Properties -> Tools, Error-checking, Check now. This will scan your hard drive for serious problems. Pray that it doesn't find any because it would mean your hard drive has serious problems that cannot be fixed.

Anyway, because I screwed up my initial setup, I ended up recovering to factory settings using the recovery disks. After redoing my setup properly, there was no huge slowdown when copying stuff. Consider doing this; it takes a long time (about 3 hours minimum to recover if you deleted the recovery partition like I did), but it seemed to fix the issue.

This post has been edited by ThisIsBoletaria: May 28 2011, 08:19 AM

Dude, Dell charges RM 249 extra to switch to 2x4GB. That's a huge margin; can we even believe that the 2x8GB price will be representative, especially considering how rare 8GB notebook RAM is?

Looks like a guide is necessary for this Acid.


Like I said, I experienced the same thing when I first got my dv6. Try defragging your hard drive, and if that doesn't help, then try restoring your system to factory settings. It could simply be that something you installed messed up a default program or something.

This post has been edited by ThisIsBoletaria: May 28 2011, 03:12 PM

Haven't tried. I just thought it might be useful for others to have a guide on the first page, much like we have for everything else.

I have a bridge in Pulau Pinang that I would like to sell to you...


Anyway, HP has put out a new BIOS update for the dv6-6001tx model. This update is really useful if you need to turn on hardware virtualization because the previous BIOS took the option completely out. If you don't know what hardware virtualization is, then you probably haven't come across a situation where you need it: usually only crazy people like me who like to play with Virtual Machines who will be interested in it.

Anyway, the steps to turn on hardware virtualization is as follows:

1) Download the BIOS update (sp53216.exe) and install it.

2) Once it's done installing, your system will restart. Press F10 to enter the BIOS.

3) Under Advanced Options, look for "Virtualization Settings" or something similar and set it to "Enabled". The BIOS might complain at you and say that you should only enable it if you need it. Don't worry; Windows 7 runs fine with it on.

4) Save settings and reboot. Keep pressing F8 so that you trigger the startup options for Windows. Once it comes up, just turn off your notebook by pressing the power button. If you miss the timing and Windows starts up, just Shut Down Windows after it's done loading.

5) Unplug your notebook and leave it alone for 10 seconds.

6) Restart your notebook and boot normally. Virtualization should now be active.

Steps 4 and 5 are important because sometimes the Hardware Virtualization settings refuse to kick in unless you completely power down the notebook. If it still doesn't work after doing that, unplug your notebook and remove the battery for at least 10 seconds.

No problems with Windows 7, and my virtual machines are running fine.

No problems whatsoever, except that initial slow hard drive problem that has disappeared.



I'm one of the ones that considered the N53SN as well and I chose the dv6 mainly because of reevephon's notebook temperature review. I am very particular about heat after having heat-related issues cause damage to almost every single one of my previous notebooks and I was very much attracted by the good temperatures shown in his review, along with the conventional layout of vents underneath compared to the N53 series.

The second reason I picked the dv6 was bang for buck. For more or less the same price as the N53Sv, I get a better GPU and a larger hard drive.

Third, the dv6 has smaller dimensions than the N53 series, which is humongous. I was very surprised when I first saw the N53Sv, because I couldn't quite believe that it needed to be that big.

Lastly, there were just so many reports of problems with the N53 series that it really put me off buying it. I've always liked ASUS' notebooks and how problem-free they usually are, but something seemed to have gone wrong somewhere with the N53 series.

Of course, there are some features of the N53Sv that I wish the dv6 had. First and foremost is the 4 RAM slots; I like the idea of having 16GB on the tap without having to buy expensive 8GB DDR3 sticks like you would have to with the newer dv6-61xx series. You can never have too much RAM.

Second is nVidia's Optimus. Yes, AMD has its own implementation of switchable graphics, but it's fiddly and not seamless, relying on manual switching between the Intel HD 3000 and the Radeon 6770. The latest AMD Catalyst update includes an attempt to approach Optimus' ease of use in terms of auto-select, but I can never seem to get it to remember which programs use what settings. Not HP's fault, but seriously, how hard could it be to incorporate a check against a list of which GPU the user prefers a particular program use?

Third is the N53 series' implementation of a full keyboard with numpad. I prefer that the N53 series' arrow keys are not shrunk and are easier to find.

Yeah, I know. My last two notebooks were Asus notebooks so I was originally set on the N53 series, but well... the physical size of the notebook put me off. Seriously, it surprised me that it was as big as I would expect a 17-incher to be.



Ha, RAM problems. Some dv6 users reported clashes with specific brands of RAM too; I wonder if this is some kind of trend in new notebooks?




Yeah. I've adjusted to it myself, but it's still a little irksome to see HP make the up and down keys half-height. Like I said, I prefer Asus's solution to it.

I'm not holding my breath. So far, I've not been impressed with their experimental implementation of it in the latest Catalyst, plus we're kind of at the mercy of HP when it comes to graphics driver updates. It's another issue that I had with my previous HP as well, but never with the Asus ones: we're expected to use HP's custom drivers for the most part, and it takes brave people like Acid and reevephon to test out new Catalyst drivers because it could just as easily break our switchable graphics.

We'll see.

On the issue of Asus bloatware, it's actually pretty easy to remove if you know what is needed for everything to work. I think I gave a few tips on solving hardware key issues on Asus notebooks in the N53 thread (basically, if the hardware keys don't work, just reinstall the ATK driver). The key thing is to read on the Internets and read things like this.

Not a dv6 specific problem. Basically, the Games for Windows Live installation that's supposed to happen when you install the game did not install properly. Fix here.

This post has been edited by ThisIsBoletaria: Jun 5 2011, 09:25 PM

Yo dawg, I herd you like computers, so we put a computer in your computer so you can compute while you compute.

That is a virtual machine, and you can install a completely different OS in it or install weird programs or make a computer virus petri dish in it without affecting your actual computer.



If you like, you can even have a computer inside a computer inside a computer, which is also known as V M C E P T I O N

I've been having the same no HDD temperature problem in HWMonitor since day one. It's just weirdness, I guess.