HP Envy 14-1260SE Beats Edition Notebook (Black) Review

Customer Ratings:

This is one sweet machine. So far not a single problem with the software or hardware. A couple of caveats to that: The battery lasts about one hour while working and about two hours sitting idle. I contacted HP about this and it is a known problem. HP assured me that when the problem is resolved they will let me (and all owners) know what the fix is and repair it at their cost if necessary. It may just be a BIOS update or a different battery; we'll see, and I'll update when I know more. You can (and should) order the "slice" (HP 6-cell Slim Fit Battery for Envy 14-1000 Series (RS06)) secondary battery. This will boost the working time to about four hours including the original battery. Once they resolve the battery issue, I hope to get about eight hours out of the two battery configuration. Second, the touchpad takes a little getting used to. The right and left click buttons are built into the touchpad and the pointer will move while trying to click, but I've pretty much gotten the hang of it now. Finally, back in November or December HP went to a two-year warranty for all ENVY computers, however, not all serial numbers were updated. When mine arrived the "HP Support Assistant" software said my warranty was up in one year. A short phone call to (an English speaking person in Canada) got my warranty changed to the stated two years. If you have this issue, just give them a call; my experience with customer service was better than any I've experienced in a long time (BTW they also gave me a $125 credit towards the "slice" battery bringing the cost of the second battery to less than $50.00).

So, that's all the issues I've had with this machine and all are easily fixed (or gotten used to). The machine itself is beautiful. The back-lit keyboard is awesome and easy to use, comfortable on the hands. The display is bright and crisp. The sound out of the built-in speakers is better than any other laptop I've owned, but they are still laptop speakers. To get the full benefit out of the Beats Audio setup you need to plug into headphones or an external amplified speaker system. The clock speed (CPU) is outstanding, programs open in the blink of an eye and I run a lot of "heavy" software like photoshop, cad programs, and accounting software. I can have multiple programs running at the same time and have never noticed a slowdown. I don't even know what the limit is before I'll notice any slowdown. One other benefit of this machine (and there are probably plenty of other manufacturers with the same benefit) is that you can plug in an external drive or flashdrive and tell the system to use it as system memory. So, if you have 6 GB of system memory and add a 10 GB flashdrive you'll have 16 GB of system memory. Pretty sweet!

Bottom line, I would recommend this machine to anyone (especially those with their heads stuck in an Apple)! I plan to buy a silver one for my wife. Outstanding laptop and outstanding customer support.

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I'm extremely happy I went with the HP Envy 14 Beats Edition laptop. I'm not one of those people that, when they need a new laptop, just runs to Staples and gets a crappy $400 laptop. But I'm also not one of those people who has the money to go to the apple store to get a $2000 laptop.

I'm one of those people who really spends a lot of time researching to find out which is the best laptop I can get, and for the best value -and I think this is it.

I know $1000-$1100 is still a lot for a laptop, but you really are getting a high performance, extremely portable, and sleek laptop. I was looking at the MBPros, which in my opinion, are the best "physically" designed laptops on the market, and this is actually pretty comparable. The fan is certainly louder, and it's not quite as thin as a MBPro, but design-wise it's a close second. Not only that, but the black and red back-lit keyboard really looks nice.

Performance wise, it has been awesome -extremely fast, battery life is around 4 hrs if you are actually running program, listening to music, etc, and the storage is probably more than you will ever need.

Ultimately I needed a PC no matter what because of the plethora of MS programs I run, but, if I had a choice, I would still definitely go with this. You get the performance of one of those $2000 MBPros for about half the price. (And to be honest, Windows 7 is pretty damn close to Mac OS in a lot of ways).

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I got this laptop few days after old ACER stopped working(worked 4 yrs pretty well). This one is really really good one. I recommend this laptop to every one(even the apple fans who think that there is no other laptop that can be more powerful). Yes this one is really a good & powerful one with a 6GB DDR3 memory and Intel Core i5-480M Processor 2.66GHz with Turbo Boost Technology up to 2.93 GHz.

I didn't find any issues so far in this one. It loads games really fast, has a crispy image screen and it has a nice graphics card(ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 switchable graphics with 1024MB DDR3 with up to 3738MB total graphics memory). I love the way it shutdown the machine just in about 10 seconds and takes about 20 seconds to start. The beats audio is really awesome. I have Bose In-ear head phones and i listen to high end quality of music in it.

It has all the features for every one graphics, speed, camera, bluetooth, HD audio and display.

This one rocks all the way. I am waiting for the battery issue as it runs about an hour on battery against the said 6.5hrs.

Once it is resolved this one be a sure winner.

Finally an awesome laptop totally satisfied.....

Honest reviews on HP Envy 14-1260SE Beats Edition Notebook (Black)

I have been shopping for a new notebook for a few months now. And after countless reviews I read, I finally decided to give the HP Envy 14 Beats Edition my final answer.

I received the notebook today, and it performed well until...

MY POWER BRICK FAILED WITHIN THE FIRST FEW HOURS OF MY USE.

The brick was plugged into a surge protector, and I was careful enough to charge the battery fully before I even powered it on.

As I was using it, I noticed a crackling sound coming from the the power unit. Next thing I know, the notebook switched into battery mode.

After troubleshooting the usual (another outlet, removing battery, rebooting computer, etc), I gave up and finally decided to call HP.

I remembered that as an HP Envy owner, there was a dedicated line to reach technical support. I placed the call and pressed one button for Envy owners. The call took about 5 minutes to reach an actual person. Not too bad.

As I was talking with the tech support, they had me go through the usual trouble shooting as well (which I gladly did). After 3 different unsuccessful cures, I was told that I had a defective AC Adapter.

Since the product was still in warranty, they offered to send me a new AC Adapter at no charge. Of course, before taking my address and shipping information, they had to offer an accidental warranty to me.

The call took about 45 mins, and the result is that HP is shipping me a new AC Adapter via FED EX NEXT DAY.

What can I say? I am pleased with HP for standing behind their products, but also disappointed that the product failed so soon.

BOTTOM LINE: YOU MIGHT NOT BE THE ENVY OF EVERYONE AROUND YOU IF AND WHEN YOUR AC ADAPTER FAILS ON YOUR HP ENVY 14 BEATS EDITION.

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I've been using this laptop now for probably about a year and a half and it's finally time to trash it. Even though its an older edition laptop at this point, I decided to come give my review on it. I've been disappointed with this laptop from day 1!

I ordered this laptop new online. If I would have actually seen it in person, I probably never would have ordered it in the first place. I hate the "soft touch" surface. All it does is collect dust and make the laptop look bad. I also do not like the way the mousepad and mouse buttons are designed. It's very user unfriendly and has been a constant frustration for me over the past 18 months. But considering I ordered this laptop "blind" I do not consider these 2 things major complaints. Onto the real problems...

When I tried to initially start up the laptop, it was giving me an error message. It wouldnt start. I called HP and after they led me through some tests, it was determined that my hard drive was defective. They mailed out a new hard drive with instructions. I was charged for this, but upon returning the defective hard drive though the mail, I would be credited with my money back. This is all quite a hassle considering I'm living overseas. The installation was easy enough though and my laptop finally started up and was ready to use.

The laptop functioned properly for a while but then the first thing to go was the built in webcam. The laptop would no longer recognize the webcam, making it unusable. I use the webcam frequently for chatting with family and friends back home. I had to buy an external cam.

A while later the cord started to develope a short in it somewhere. I had to fiddle with it and get it in the exact right position for it to get power to the laptop. This also became quite a hassle but I always managed to keep the laptop charged.

Around this same time, the dvd player started to develope problems. Sometimes it would read and play a disk, sometimes it wouldnt. Sometimes it cannot read a disk and just spits it back out. Sometimes I have to reinsert the disk 5 times before it finally reads it. This is no problem with the disks themselves; it does this even this brand new officially licensed dvds. This problem became worse over time until finally just recently, it will not play any dvds at all. At this point I have no more use for this laptop. It's finally time to trash it and buy a new one.

I had problems with my previous HP laptop, yet I bought this one never the less. And after my experience here, I will probably never buy an HP laptop again. Aside from the issues I mentioned, it performed good, but just too many issues! Others may have not experienced these problems, but for me this laptop was a disaster from day 1. I expected much more from this laptop, which was not cheap (I paid about $1500 for this when it was a new model).