Updates from Asus

I'm aware of the search function, but power4gear was made by asus? So the latest version would be on their site and not the stock version or are they both there?

To be more specific, normally, the latest updates are never the stock stable version. But you're saying the latest ver is on asus site?

 

I guess Xellon is having a blonde moment.

http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/nb/Apps/P4GHybrid/Power4Gear_Hybrid_Win7_32_Win7_64_z1140.zip

 

Did I really sound that way

edit - ahem, well, it seems asus did make it. You see, I didn't know since I wasn't on my laptop. See, I have an excuse.....

 

I use it because it automatically switches off the optical disk drive and webcam. It saves me having to disable them manually in device manager. That saves a few watts.

It also gives you extra options in the advanced power settings. Plus with it installed I can hit a quick keyboard shortcut to switch between power modes.

I don't use twin turbo, but it's fun to hit the button sometimes just for nostalgia. SetFSB is my overclock program of choice. I just find I hardly use it because there's nothing that runs slowly on this machine.

I can't say for sure, but I think I save 15-30 minutes of battery just by using P4GH combined with Windows 7 power saving tweaks and some of my own methods. In a nutshell Hellcry, I use it to save battery power.

 

I didnt do measurments on idle webcam and OD power consumption (i mean its practically off if youre not using them), but im pretty sure its close to none...
Every single power option and LOADS more can be unlocked in registry, you can create custom power plans or edit the three existing ones and switch between them with just 2 mouse clicks, but i guess to each his own...
I just never liked to have unnecessary software on my machines and i like to configure such things as power settings myself instead of relying on someone elses judgment .

 

To be honest, I wish I could get away without using any Asus software at all, P4GH included. But without the ATK (which runs three processes) I can't use certain keyboard functions and the three little buttons in the upper left won't work. My ideal setup would be to run a clean install with lots of Windows components removed and only necessary or wanted services running.

But Asus has my hands tied with the keyboard software. Other than that and P4GH, I run a clean machine.

Anyway, on topic, I installed the latest version of P4GH. Nothing looks different. Maybe there are a few more options somewhere that I don't know about. I noticed the file size has doubled since the first release of this program. Maybe there are just a lot of bug fixes included.

 

I noticed that the brightness slider shows a 0-10 value whereas the older version showed a 0-100.

 

Also there were three peripherals that you could turn off to save power and now only two: webcam and CD/DVD/BR.

A typical Asus tool that follows none of the standard things (menus,right-click context, about, help, etc)

 

I just ordered a JH-X1 from Newegg. Came on here after hearing there were some issues. Is there a post somewhere that can give the most recent solution to the issues involved? Is it generally believed that "something" needs to be done out of the box, or is it better to wait and see what issues you have first?
I tried searching but it's unbelievable how much activity there is on this forum. I simply do not have time to sift through it all right now.

I was planning to wipe the hard drive to get rid of bloat and start over with a clean install of W7, then get the latest bios/drivers from asus.

 

I'll give you my advice... others may be different.

Some machines have GSOD... Gray Screen of Death. This is fairly common. The fix is updating your vBIOS. The Asus manager that helps us with our issues (Gary Keys) indicated that they started putting this on the machines in the factory so you may not need it. GPU-Z will tell you your vBIOS revision. Match it against the latest beta that is in a sticky thread at the top of this forum.

All machines have a software conflict between the Creative software and Steam. Follow the instructions in the sticky thread. (It's just making sure you have the latest versions of the right packages.)

The stock version of Power4Gear has some minor issues. I would go ahead and update to the latest on Asus site if you want to use P4G to manage power profiles. It's not necessary. Windows built-in ACPI works fine.

Make sure your BIOS revision is at least 209. 211 is not a big deal, but prior to 209 there are problems.

Update to the latest released Catalyst mobility drivers. Currently 10.8. Otherwise you will have compatibility issues with some newer games.

I can't really think of anything else that would cause you problems right out of the box. Avoid GSOD and Creative/Steam lockups. Everything else is pretty optional.

 

Wow, thanks very much! Really appreciate it.

It is nice to know that there are some things I can do right away to at least reduce the chance of a problem.
I really do want this unit to be what I was hoping for.

I'll try to come back on here once I get it and post some impressions.

 

BUMP!

Sad to see this on 5th page... but symptomatic.

So I bump hoping for the unlikely, though for me Asus has catalogued G73JH as a "passé" product and we'll get the support Win3.11 gets.

 

I do not understand what you are referring to. The JH is still being sold and most issues have been resolved. What are you specifically looking to resolve?

Cheers,

 

One thing i do notice is that, with the old vbios, i could set clocks down to 100/300 and it would work fine. Now with the "fixed" vbios, the lowest i can go is 100/400. Setting it lower would just freeze up. Well its something i can live with, so its not a problem. Just something i noticed

 

oops...well i've been using the one Hellcry did with profiles like the msi vbios..and i guess it goes low to 100/150...with no glitches....some ppl had issues with it..but mine has been Rock solid since ...

 

haven't heard from gary in 2 weeks. Did anyone did any further debugging with the touchpad? I know about moodpad and I believe someone said it was caused by th bios. Windows drivers work but you lose any features. anything else?

 

He's still working on it. I am dealing with missed keystrokes/lag. It seems there are two issues with the touchpad... one is missed keystrokes and the other being erratic cursor behavior. I'm not even sure the two are related. Xellon are you missing keystrokes as well or just the weird cursor stuff where it is moving the wrong way, stuck, or moving erratically?

 

What about the creative update... he should have already had an update.

 

He's only communicated with me about the touchpad/missing keystrokes issue. I think Chastity would be the only one that would know about that.

PS: I turned the TP back on in BIOS to test and the dropped keystrokes while typing this message are making me say bad words!

 

I doubt any ASUS techs are actually working on the issue right now to be honest... they have better things to do. In about 3 months they'll be like "remember that missed keystrokes for the G73?" "LOL oh yeah, that ancient thing. Poor s"

 

Creative update: Apparently a license was ordered, but something has Gary saying bad words.

 

lol what? Didn't get that.. be more direct plz...

 

He's cursing out the situation at the moment.

 

Sometimes throwing a temper tantrum gets it done, well it always worked for my sister when she was young.

 

The question is, is he cursing the situation because of what it took to get it done, or is he cursing the situation because he knows we'll be upset when we get the details?

 

Most likely because the problem is intermittent, inconsistent, implacable, intolerable and impossible to resolve on certain machines.

Cheers,
Today's message brought to you by the letter "I"

 

I am the system administrator and IT purchaser for my company. We bought four of these Asus G73JH laptops with an eye toward leaving Dell behind (which we've already done in the data center). Waiting for the G73, I was like a little kid waiting for a new toy for Christmas. Then that toy was under the tree, but it didn't work at all like it was supposed to. And all we get now is an utter lack of competence and false promises from the company.

Each laptop we've purchased has a different one of the issues listed in this thread. One has a serious keyboard lag (even when typing slowly); one has the GSOD; one has an errant (and horrifically frustrating) touchpad; and one has no keyboard lights (or any ATK keyboard functions, for that matter). And every so-called solution from this thread and others has been tried (wasting more time than I care to admit).

I have wasted countless hours trying to resolve these issues, and I'm at my wits' end. Luckily, we purchase so much equipment from our IT supplier that we can likely just return these lemons and be done with Asus forever. If this test with Asus had worked out, we would have ordered 50-100 laptops from them over the next six months. But I suggest that all of you do as my company is doing: Vote with your wallet, and let Asus know that this type of incompetence will not be tolerated. Only then will they actually fix anything.

So it's back to the laptop reviews to find a new laptop supplier.

 

I couldn't agree more.

 

Gary, I also have this keyboard missed keystrokes problem and I have some information that may be interesting (and hopefully useful in debugging this).

I am affected by this problem in both Win7 and Linux (Ubuntu Lucid, 64-bit). Also disabling the touchpad in the BIOS fixes it in both places.

I know you guys don't support Linux, but this at least seems to indicate that the problem may not be a driver issue. (And if you guys do put out a driver fix, it would only solve half my problems. )

 

Which would support what some have speculated, that it is more of a hardware/BIOS issue than a driver issue.

If it is a BIOS problem, it should be a doable fix. If it really is hardware, I would expect to not hear a solution at all, otherwise Asus would be swamped with RMAs.

 

aren't most hardware specific drivers ported over from the windows counterpart?

 

how is ubuntu running on these laptops?

 

sry for the late reply. I'm just having strange behavior from my pad.

edit - I think its hardware... to be honest, I go old school. When my touchpad starts to act crazy (whenever I use it, instead of moving, it would zoom in/out only and never move), I hit on it pretty hard with my finger and then it works......

 

8.8 running fine here, I should probably update to 10.10 but I'm lazy.

One thing I've always wondered about is why the keyboard lights are on by default without any weird drivers in ubuntu, whereas you need the ATK package under windows. Strange but oh well.

 

Wow that is odd. The keyboard backlight is on the whole time, then? I made some space for loading Ubuntu but haven't gotten around to it yet. I do have it running as a virtual machine, but I thought I would do a native install to see if it misses keystrokes in there like mine does in Windows 7.

 

Yeah, you know how when the lights blink on at POST and then go off when windows starts to load? Under linux they just don't go off after POST, to be fair I haven't tried turning them on/off/lowering brightness under ubuntu. I do remember that the fn volume controls worked just fine though.

If you don't want to have a native install for whatever reason you can just run ubuntu off a live usb, it's pretty much the same thing (you can only have 4GB of persistent data on a livedrive though, no matter what size your usb stick is). Unetbootin makes it pretty effortless.

 

That's really interesting. Also, some of the Fn key combinations are tied to the hardware through BIOS or something. You can unload the ATK package in Windows and some of the Fn keys still work. They don't have nice icon popup indicators, but they do work. I believe the volume and screen brightness functions work, but the keybaord backlight doesn't... this is with Windows. I defer to you on linux since I haven't gotten around to it yet.

 

See my post here for that (the one after I am linking to):
http://forum.notebookreview.com/linux-compatibility-software/451594-asus-rog-g73-ubuntu-2.html#post6219509

 

Just great. (Well apart from missing keystrokes, but that's not ubuntu-specific.)

Proprietary ATI drivers and compiz worked out-of-the-box after enabling both.

I have hotkeys for keyboard brighness working by following directions in the thread linked by ALLurGroceries.

Also I have suspend and hibernate working perfectly by following the instructions here:
[SOLVED] Cannot suspend or hibernate Asus N61J Laptop - Ubuntu Forums
(I followed the instructions in post #7)

The only problem running ubuntu is the touchpad behavior. Out of the box it moves erratically and clicks everything when your palms are near it. (i.e. while typing). It seems to be WAY too sensitive. (By polling events I can see that it registers touches when I _hover my finger just above the touchpad_.)

After lots of tweaking and configuring I got it not to jump around erratically, I got the touchpad disabled while typing, and generally lowered the sensitivity. Now it's a bit unresponsive at times, but that's better than what it was.

 

lol. Busy guy, and I think we know how asus feels about fixing these problems. Don't get me wrong, Gary finally got my 5x RMA g73 fixed. I've got keyboard issues like most people, and I'm very disappointed with it ... but there isn't much I can do personally, and asus has said they're working on it. Not much that can be done, from my side, so I just cross my fingers and hope.