HP Pavilion dv7-2170us

What Works

Everything works out of the box on Ubuntu. 3d, wifi, camera, card reader, bluetooth, even the silly included infrared remote control.

Suspend to disk is not stable. Suspend to ram works okay. Power management in general is lousy, giving about 1h20m with "extreme power saving" settings. powertop shows numerous things which should be shut down for better power savings, I've managed to get it up to close to 2h30m with various services disabled and bluetooth disabled, minimum screen brightness, and disabling 3/4 cores.

Here's how to start/stop the cores: sudo /bin/bash -c 'for i in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/online; do echo "1">$i; done'
 * 1) start the cores:

sudo /bin/bash -c 'for i in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/online; do echo "0">$i; done'
 * 1) halt the cores:

Continuing issues:

The multitouch synaptics pad doesn't work correctly yet.

The card reader stopped working (corrupt files) with a kernel update using Ubuntu 10.4 and is still broken in 10.10's 2.6.35-24-generic kernel.

The sound stops at random with both, but can be restarted by suspend/resume. All my attempts to restart sound manually by restarting pulseaudio and/or alsa and/or rmmod/insmod failed for one reason or another. Either it had no effect or it created additional sound devices which confused the sound apps. Network audio is not available with pulseaudio, so VNC sessions will go silent.

The harddrive has an accelerometer which shows up as a joystick. It could be used to write a motion detector alarm script for when you leave your laptop in a public place for a short time.

Myself and a friend bought these Jan/2010 and both required the CPU fan to be replaced within 10 months. Service was very fast - HP shipped us containers, we shipped them with free included waybill, and had them back in 3 days. HP flashed it with the latest BIOS, and set fan to 'always on' and disabled KVN in the BIOS.


 * /proc/cpuinfo ******************

processor      : 0   [ * note identical for 0..3] vendor_id      : GenuineIntel cpu family     : 6 model          : 23 model name     : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad  CPU   Q9000  @ 2.00GHz stepping       : 10 cpu MHz        : 1600.000 cache size     : 3072 KB physical id     : 0 siblings       : 4 core id        : 0 cpu cores      : 4 apicid         : 0 initial apicid : 0 fpu            : yes fpu_exception  : yes cpuid level    : 13 wp             : yes flags          : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm ida tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority bogomips       : 3989.31 clflush size   : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes  : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub (rev 07) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset PCI Express Graphics Port (rev 07) 00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03) 00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03) 00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03) 00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03) 00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 03) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03) 00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03) 00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03) 00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 03) 00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 93) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation ICH9M LPC Interface Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation ICH9M/M-E SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.6 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) Thermal Subsystem (rev 03) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M96 [Mobility Radeon HD 4650] 01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc RV710/730 02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 5100 AGN [Shiloh] Network Connection 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 02) 06:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): JMicron Technology Corp. IEEE 1394 Host Controller 06:00.1 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. SD/MMC Host Controller 06:00.2 SD Host controller: JMicron Technology Corp. Standard SD Host Controller 06:00.3 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. MS Host Controller 06:00.4 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. xD Host Controller
 * /usr/bin/lspci ******************