New laptop owner seriously confused

[JennP1023]

I have no clue how to get rid of this spoiler box. Sorry

Spoiler

I’ve had my Pavilion 15 Cs for a  little over a month, thefirst laptop I’ve ever bought myself and I’m super confused. I’ve read my user manual and the service and maintenance manual (designated for repair professionals, not product owners) cover to cover, I’ve Googled every way I can think of and I’ve asked my HP Support Assistant the same questions so many ways (I swear I can literally hear her sigh with resignation when I activate her) and I’m more confused now than ever.

1. 1 TB HDD + 16 GB Intel optane: for some reason Windows 10 is only seeing the Optane wnen i go into Disk Defragmenter because it shows that I have SSD, which is optimized automatically—Defrag is not an option. Shouldn’t Windows recognize my HDD? If yes, how do I fix? If no, then how do I optimize the drive my system won’t recognize?

2. The main selling point for me was the 9 hour battery life. I don’t watch videos or listen to music, don’t even have FB, IG or Twitter installed, I surf the web a little, check email, etc. but mostly I’m working in spreadsheets and files right on my desktop. I have 8 GB RAM, Dont have a lot of programs installed or running in the background.  I’ve done everything recommended to extend battery life and if I’m lucky I can get 4 hours from full charge to 9%, which is when it goes into hibernation. I’ve tested and calibrated the battery, HP ASSISTANT tells me it’s working normally. So either HP exaggerated the battery life or my diagnostic isn’t working right. Anyone have any idea of how I can resolve?

3. Lastly, CAN I upgrade the RAM myself or will that void my warranty? The service and maintenance manual (designated for service and repair persons, not product owners)  says the RAM isn’t accessible by owner and RAM is not upgradable. 

Thanks to to everyone in advance!!

[iomare]

Hi,

You do not need to optimize the drive as you have Optane which is acting as a cache for the Hard drive and the drivers and controllers will take care of optimization of your drives.

Battery life stated is in my experience always much higher than in actual life. Lowering screen brightness, turning off wifi, turning off bluetooth... can help.

Upgrading RAM is an accepted practice as long as you do not break anything during the upgrade.

If you provide the complete model or product number I can give you some help in how you would do this.

https://support.hp.com/my-en/document/c00033108

Hope it helps,

David

Please click on thumbs up for thanks

Please click on accept as solution if answered your question

[Petro_ · Accepted solution]

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@JennP1023 wrote:

I have no clue how to get rid of this spoiler box. Sorry

Spoiler

I’ve had my Pavilion 15 Cs for a  little over a month, thefirst laptop I’ve ever bought myself and I’m super confused. I’ve read my user manual and the service and maintenance manual (designated for repair professionals, not product owners) cover to cover, I’ve Googled every way I can think of and I’ve asked my HP Support Assistant the same questions so many ways (I swear I can literally hear her sigh with resignation when I activate her) and I’m more confused now than ever.

1. 1 TB HDD + 16 GB Intel optane: for some reason Windows 10 is only seeing the Optane wnen i go into Disk Defragmenter because it shows that I have SSD, which is optimized automatically—Defrag is not an option. Shouldn’t Windows recognize my HDD? If yes, how do I fix? If no, then how do I optimize the drive my system won’t recognize?

2. The main selling point for me was the 9 hour battery life. I don’t watch videos or listen to music, don’t even have FB, IG or Twitter installed, I surf the web a little, check email, etc. but mostly I’m working in spreadsheets and files right on my desktop. I have 8 GB RAM, Dont have a lot of programs installed or running in the background.  I’ve done everything recommended to extend battery life and if I’m lucky I can get 4 hours from full charge to 9%, which is when it goes into hibernation. I’ve tested and calibrated the battery, HP ASSISTANT tells me it’s working normally. So either HP exaggerated the battery life or my diagnostic isn’t working right. Anyone have any idea of how I can resolve?

3. Lastly, CAN I upgrade the RAM myself or will that void my warranty? The service and maintenance manual (designated for service and repair persons, not product owners)  says the RAM isn’t accessible by owner and RAM is not upgradable. 

Thanks to to everyone in advance!!

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Since your hard drive is there it is recognized by windows.

Not familiar with optane but I guess if You cant defrag your mechanical disk this optane does it when needed. Since you're not a heavy user it doesn't matter much anyway.

HP does exagerate the battery life, as every other manufactor. Getting under half of it is not ok... Open task manager and have it on screen for like half an hour without doing anything, see if the background processes really have something to do with it.

If you have 8gb of ram you don't really need to upgrade, there's no performance increase on that hardware. Still, I would do it myself, You are apparently alowed to open up the back.

Personal thoughts: If you want to burn money, throw out HDD and optane and replace with an NVMe 1TB stick. Power saving, faster and safer. Check for sure the support of NVMe and if compatible, buy Samsung or Crucial.

[JennP1023]

Thank you! I’ll do the task manager tonight, see what happens. Wouldn’t surprise me if there were programs running in the background—I already caught amazon photos running at startup though I specifically set it to off.

[JennP1023]

Thanks, David! My product is 3dy10av (from my order confirmation) or 3AJ13AV (from my dashboard). I’ve lowered all display settings, went dark theme, paused slideshow on battery—everything HP and Windows recommended and still barely get 4 hours.

appreciate the extra help with upgrading RAM, too!! Would you happen to know how many pins my ram would have? A DATA 8 GB 2400 DDR4 is what’s in there now.

thanks again!!

jenn

[Petro_]

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@JennP1023 wrote:

Thank you! I’ll do the task manager tonight, see what happens. Wouldn’t surprise me if there were programs running in the background—I already caught amazon photos running at startup though I specifically set it to off.

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You are welcome.

As an example, my laptop which I have cleaned from bloatware therally runs at 0.5-1% cpu load at idle and it stay the, no crazy spikes... That is with only Chrome browser open, nothing else.

[iomare]

You're welcome Jenn.

Your PC supports max 32GB of DDR4 2400Mhz (2x16GB) even if service manual mentions 16GB

They are SODIMMS (notebook memory). All notebook DDR4 will be 260 pins.

You can buy from your preferred brand such as Crucial, Samsung...

On page 56 of service manual you can see the steps to upgrade the RAM:

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c06248419

All the best,

David

[JennP1023]

Hi Petro,

So I had Task Manager open for 30 minutes tonight.  I didn't use my external mouse and turned off my keyboard backlight. The only things that open at startup are Intel Delayed Launcher and Windows Defender Security Notifications.

I opened Chrome and just let it idle.

CPU: 10-11%

Memory: 33-40%

Disk: 1-3%

Chrome (with 11 separate processes?) used between 0 and 0.3% of CPU

Windows Explorer used between 9.8 and 11.7% of CPU

At the end of the 30 minutes the battery was at 91%

I did it yesterday, too, and got about the same result except I was using my external mouse and had my keyboard backlight on.

I really began using it about 4:45pm yesterday, running my CCleaner (which never went higher than 2.8% CPU the entire time).

Windows Explorer varied between 9 and 13.8% of CPU

System varied between 0.9 to 1.2% of CPU

By 6;52pm my battery was at 12% so I had to plug it in.  That's when things got weird.

      The cooling fan, which has been silent for days, came on sounding like an airplane taking off the second I plugged the charger in. It ran contantly at a dull  whir until 7:21pm, when CCleaner was done and I shut it down.  

Below is also what happened the secondI plugged the charger in:

       CPU usage jumped to 50% 

        Memory usage jumped to 36%

         Disk usage jumpted to 100%

Only thing running was my CCleaner and it was using 1.5% CPU, 10.3MB of Memory and 92.9MB/s under Disk (I don't know what that means, I just wrote it down).  Total Power for CCleaner was showing Very Low.

Both System and Windows Explorer are running in the background with 21% and 21.5% CPU, respectively. Total Power for both is showing VERY HIGH. They pretty much stayed this way until I signed off at 7:21pm.

Tonight, including the 30 minutes of idle time, I've been on for 1 hour and 13 minutes and my battery is at 77% charge.  MY HP Support Assistant is open, but idle and I'm flipping between HP Support in Chrome and One Note (where I have all the notes from yesterday and today's tests).

If you can think of anything at all that I may be missing, I'm all ears because this 3 hour battery life is the pits!  TBH, I'm not sure that I've removed all the bloatware.  This was a custom order and it didn't appear to have that much bloatware when I got it.

[Petro_]

Bloatware is all HP software and half of windows... 😉 Proof is my Linux Mint 19.1 installation, my hardware is overall cooler, eunigine 4.0 runs 5% faster and only 1.5gb of ram is used, without Chrome it runs under 1gb... It's really amazing!

In windows, I have deleted all bloatware, All. I reinstalled Windows clean (you need a new key for that!!!), told it not to accept manufacture updates, I installed THE LATEST drivers from Intel which HP doesn't...

Then I run this script to clean windows up: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/windows-10-bloatware-windows10debloater

 If you choose to do something of what I did, PLEASE read twice before using your fingers! I am not able to support in hacks overall...

In ccleaner you can unistall too, more than windows allows, done that too.