Is this laptop OK?

[cahumb]

First of all, hello and thanks for reading and answering if you can.

 

I have an HP ENVY 17-j150la laptop with the following specs:

-17 inch 1600x900 screen

-Intel i7 4702MQ

-16 GB of ram

-Nvidia 750M with 4GB dedicated memory

-750 GB HDD

-Has a leapmotion controller that  I wouldn't miss that much

-Came preinstalled with windows 8.1

Just want to know if it would be possible to put OSX on it.

I don´t want to format my hard drive right now because I´m an engineering student and I´ve got lots of important stuff in there, but I´m a musician as well and plan using OSX for my musical efforts while keeping windows for university, if it´s not possible to install OSX while keeping my current windows installation intact I could make the effort to get an external hard drive and install OSX on it.

 

Thanks for reading

[mnfesq]

The HP Envy works really well with OS X but it's not always easy to get them to work perfectly.  Everything works perfectly on mine except the card reader which will never work because it is pci-e and apple only supports USB card readers.  Here's a link to a thread regarding the model preceding yours.  You have the j100 series, this is the j000 series.  Most of the information should be helpful to you.

 

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/290687-wip-hp-envy-17t-j000-quad-haswell-10851091010/

 

Good luck.

 

(P.S. - It's a pity that HP makes the Envy 17 with a 1600x900 screen resolution.  Mine is the last model with 1920x1080 resolution.  Makes it hard for me to want to upgrade.)

[cahumb]

Thanks for the awesome answer!

Do you think it will be possible to install OSX without harming my current windwos installation?

Ps: Yeah I know, the resolution isn´t that good, still it's an awesome performer!

[mnfesq]

Thanks for the awesome answer!

Do you think it will be possible to install OSX without harming my current windwos installation?

Ps: Yeah I know, the resolution isn´t that good, still it's an awesome performer!

 

That's up to you.  Windows 8.1 can be touchy when you use a bootloader on the efi partition that is not the windows bootloader.  It is certainly possible but I can't guarantee that you won't mess it up, particularly if you are new to OSx86.  That said, since you have a 17-inch laptop, you could go the route I did and not risk messing up your windows disk.  I have OS X installed on a mSATA drive, which your laptop should also support.  After having an SSD, I could never go back to a SATA system drive.  The Envy will boot automatically from the mSATA drive if you have one installed.  Otherwise, it will boot from the SATA drive in bay 1.  It will never boot from the SATA drive in bay 2.  I have 2 SATA drives, each 1TB, and use both bays.  My Windows disk is in bay 2 and I use Clover, installed on my mSATA drive, to boot into Windows.  It works just fine but if, somehow, I totally screwed up my OS X installation, I would have to switch my Windows disk from bay 2 to bay 1 in order to boot to Windows without using Clover.

 

BTW, I almost never boot to Windows anymore.  Instead, I have Tuxera NTFS installed in OS X and use Parallels to create a Windows virtual machine in OS X.  While my Windows disk has 8.1 on it, Parallels has virtual machines of Windows 7 and Windows 10.  I almost always use Windows 7 for my work and I save my data to the Windows disk and not to a virtual drive.  This may seem complicated but it works really well for me and saves me from having to reboot to switch between Windows and OS X.

 

Good luck and enjoy your new laptop.