Asus G1S and 4GB RAM (XP + Linux) partial solution

Hi All,

I have Asus G1S with 4GB RAM installed and I have nVidia drivers working in XP and Linux. Actually, currently maximum RAM available is 3GB, but this is more that 2GB And maybe the next BIOS upgrade will give 512MB more.

Thanks for this thread by Irathi, which explained what to do in XP in order to get nVidia drivers loaded correctly:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=146088

In short, open My Computer | Properties and select Hardware tab and click on Device Manager button. There you will see a list on devices. Scroll down and open System devices. Disable following three devices:

Intel(R) ICH8 Family PCI Express Root Port 3
Intel(R) ICH8 Family PCI Express Root Port 4
Intel(R) ICH8 Family PCI Express Root Port 5

Reboot the machine and install the video drivers again. Now you will have 3GB RAM and nVidia drivers load correctly.

When booting Linux, just add following boot line argument:

mem=3040M

ie. Linux should access RAM less than 3072M. This has been tested with openSuse 10.3. I have not tested this yet with other Linux distros.

Have fun and let's hope that Asus will provide us fixed BIOS any time soon!

 

Here's more info about the PCI Express Root Ports from Somber in thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=146088&page=26 that

PCI Express Root Port 1 is realtek RTL8168/8111 gigabit ethernet adapter
PCI Express Root Port 2 is intel wifi 4965AGN network adapter
PCI Express Root Port 3 not used
PCI Express Root Port 4 not used
PCI Express Root Port 5 is jmcron JMB360 sata2 ahci controller

So I do not know, if disabling port 5 will do any harm other than disabling the external SATA port.