A few problems w/ Asus F6 Series

Hi,

I've recently bought an F6S for myself and a F6E for my girlfriend, both running Vista, and they've mostly been good but there's a few problems. I've emailed ASUS support and their only idea was to repair the Vista installation from the disk, erasing the HD, which I'd rather not do. I was wondering if anyone can help out with these problems.

On the FS6 (T7200, 3GB, 160GB, Onboard Audio):
- Audio lag is really bad. When I play music it stutters every 5 or 10 seconds, and when the computer is doing something like opening a new program the audio almost stops. It doesn't matter what music player I use, and the problem occurs with all audio types and sometimes with system sounds as well. It has been this way since I bought the computer, and all the latest drivers from ASUS and Windows updates are installed.
- My taskbar has no programs. When they are minimised they do not show up down the bottom, they just disappear and I have to alt+tab to get them back. It has been this way for a few weeks, and happened suddenly while I was browsing. I've tried everything I can think of but can't get them back.

On the F6E (T8300, 2GB, 250GB): When returning from hibernation, the system crashes and restarts every time. It gets up to "resuming Windows..." but then shuts down and restarts, and all data is lost.

Any ideas at all?!? The computers are only about 2 months old.

Thanks a lot,

Ed

 

-S: Audio driver could be bad; reinstall it from driver disk, but I don't know which one that might be. Taskbar could have some unintended option checked or enabled since it doesn't sound like it came that way at receipt. Look around in the taskbar options to see what's there and reset to defaults.

-E: Try unchecking the hibernation option, then restart the system. Re-enable hibernation and then see if same problem occurs.... sometimes the hibernation .sys file can get corrupted and give this sort of symptom, which is generally cured by clearing and reinitializing it this way.

Final option for both (unless others have more thoughts) would then be OS recovery - use the recovery partition to expedite this to factory-fresh specs, but obviously back up your data first.

 

On the F6S, also check the Task Manager to see if there are processes that take more CPU than they should (any typical process encountered in desktop and office work that takes more than 20% of CPU for more than a few seconds at a time -- is a possible culprit).

They may slow down your machine. If you do find processes that take too much CPU, there is the possibility that you have malware on the machine; do a thorough virus scan with a good antivir.

 

Nothing that goes over a few % for an extended period of time, firefox and task manager often jump up to about 20 or 30% when I'm using them but come back down again when idle. Nothing that looks out of line to me.

 

I've reinstalled the driver a couple of times from the newest driver on the ASUS website, with no success. Should I try again with a driver from disk?
I've played around endlessly with taskbar options, there's nothing that should make the programs disappear (in fact I don't think such an option exists at all in Vista).

Where is this hibernation option?


Thanks a lot for the help.

 

Another thing I've just noticed is that even though all the running processes in task manager add up to less than 10%, the graph of %CPU usage sometimes jumps up to almost 100%.

Not sure if this helps at all...

 

No more ideas anyone?!

 

From your description, check your power gear settings. You may have accidentally left your Power Gear setting in Battery Saving mode. Normally your processor power is restricted in this mode.

Set the PowerGear in High Performance setting and see if this does the job. If not, I suggest to recover the 1st hdd partition using asus recovery. After that install a firewall, antivirus, and anti spyware before you start surfing the net. (to my understanding, all these problems only happened after surfing the net)