Asus N81Vp: sluggish performance on battery in Windows XP?

hey folks. Got hold of an N81Vp (HD4650 model) two weeks ago, special order from the States thru a local retailer I'm on good terms with since Asus' New Zealand reps are useless and only sell a limited number of models here, half of them Eees. so far I'm finding it's a brilliant laptop, the sizing and aesthetics are perfect, and with the amount of GPU grunt on hand I can show up to LANs without having to lug my desktop and screen around

anyway, within an hour of getting it I'd blown vista into a fine red mist and installed my usual dual-boot Ubuntu/XP setup, configured the way I like it etc... but I then started noticing that whenever I happened to be running on battery power XP was performing really sluggishly. Like you'd click My Computer and the window would take 30 seconds to draw, followed by another 20 seconds of flickering as it drew the icons followed by the text. Trying to use firefox is worse, especially on image-intensive pages, and don't even think of gaming

Anyone else running XP find their N81Vp does the same thing? it doesn't bother me as much as it could, since I spend most of my time in Ubuntu anyway, but for those times I have to boot into XP while I'm on battery to do something that can't be done in *nix it can get really painful.

double-checked the XP install guide at the start of the owner's lounge thread, I've definitely installed everything mentioned by the author, and have installed all the Asus utils from their site (dual-core fix, battery fix etc). upgrading from XP SP2 to SP3 didn't change a thing either. Tried both the Asus ATI Catalyst 8.whatever and the "hacked" DNA ATI 9.2s, no difference.

the fact that Ubuntu (intrepid) works perfectly fine on battery power with no slowdowns at all leads me to think it definitely ain't a hardware problem.

could it be an ACPI issue in XP, or something to do with the GPU not throttling down when the CPU does? Or maybe there is an obscure XP driver I've happened to miss? as soon as you plug in the AC power, the laptop returns to its usual perky self. My gut feeling is that XP is simply getting too old to handle cutting-edge CPUs and GPUs, especially when it comes to power-saving.

either way, I'm curious to hear your thoughts :>

 

If I'm not mistaken, CPU and GPU throttles down when running on batt. Common thing nowadays.

Perhaps other posters will be able to elaborate. I claim to be no expert.

 

Well one would assume that the power management software that came with the pc would be alot better then just having device drivers and basic laptop power management in xp.

One thing i like about the asus software that is missing from windows in general is switching to batt mode when the plug is removed, many linux distros go into the equivalent of balanced while windows sucks away.

As far as i remember (I would have to check again) The gpu down throttles on the G50 in xp no problem but its part of the GPU bios anyways. Check your updates what sp are you on? Have you looked at device manager to see if there is a nice big question mark next to the acpi driver?

 

Thanks for the replies.

Yes the CPU and GPU are meant to throttle down when running on battery power, but there is obviously something strange with the way Windows XP chooses to handle it. Ubuntu runs great in battery mode.

I was running XP SP3, with all windows updates installed and that didn't help things any. Rolled back to SP2, again installed all of the relevant updates, still no change. Device manager doesn't have anything with (!) next to it.

ah well, guess I can live with it a while longer while I puzzle it over some more. Besides, my manager has been bugging us to install 7 RC on all "non-essential" PCs where possible, I wonder if this counts as belonging to that category

 

CPU throttling (aka speedstep) will be the biggest contributing factor for slow performance on battery mode. However, you can also check the below link and try to optimize your XP operating system for better performance.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=305223

 

If your on XP at the moment you might have a decent transition to 7 assuming your stuff runs on vista.

My transition to 7 would make me lose the same things id lose going to XP. I hope ASUS updates some of the essential stuff for 7 like the facial recognition. I dont care about direct console as I am writing a replacement for it.

 

How is Ubuntu on that system? Was it plug and play or did it take some fiddling with drivers to get everything working? I'm seriously considering that same system and I run Linux Mint (an Ubuntu offshoot). I think you're the only person I've seen so far on the internets that runs Linux on the N81Vp. Thanks in advance and sorry I'm no help with the xp problems!

 

Ubuntu was quite literally plug and play apart from having to enable the restricted fglrx driver after installation (otherwise you're stuck in 1024x768 with no compiz effects). Not sure if this is still the case with Jaunty as I'm using Intrepid.

still no joy with the sluggish battery performance in XP... but since I last posted I'm almost convinced it's a graphics driver issue now, as I had to uninstall the ATI drivers the other day to test something - and lo and behold, booting into Windows with the built-in VGA driver loaded (but NOT safe mode!), running on battery power, it no longer had any of the pesky slowdown issues.

 

Try official Asus Power4Gear for XP, it's listed under N81Vp's download page:

http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/nb/Apps/P4G/P4G_XP_090318.zip

With P4G you can adjust CPU performance when it's on battery mode, it might work better than XP's power management .

For video card you can also disable ATI PowerPlay in Catalyst settings.

 

GenTechPC, looks like I owe you a beer or something! Turns out it was the ATI PowerPlay settings, therefore a graphics driver issue I already have P4G installed, and obviously that made no difference.

PowerPlay is now disabled and XP is all nice 'n perky running on battery power, the way it should be. Obviously the "maximize battery life" setting needs a bit more work...

hooray, now I can play [game of the month] at the breakfast table /in the boardroom

 

Ditto I had to get my laptop from the USA!

I am trying to install Windows XP (32-bit) on the N81Vp but running into the usual annoying M$ related problems! I tried my copy of Windows XP SP0 - blue screen. Windows XP SP0 + nlited SP2 = blue screen. Windows XP SP0 + nlited SP3 = blue screen. Windows XP SP0 + nlited SP3 + nlited drivers (ASUS website) = blue screen...

The blue screen always happens just when the Windows disk has finished initially copying over the storage drivers - just before the disk partitioning screen... Appears to crap out when it tries to access the SATA drive - so presumably it is a problem with the SATA host controller being set to ACHI mode vs. ATA legacy mode???!!

So OP can you help me out? How did you find the Windows XP install process and did you need to slip stream any drivers, etc.?

I have tried out installing Windows 7 RC (32-bit) on the lappy as well. The Vista sound driver works well but I can't figure out how to get the ATI driver to supersede the Windows 7 display driver (which appears not to have any 3D acceleration). I'll definitely be taking the free upgrade as I find Vista to be real pain to use (slow + cumbersome interface). Anyone else tried Windows 7. I must say the installing GUI and driver searching tools are way, way more advanced than Windows XP.

I will also want to try out Linux-Mint 7 soon as well to see how that fairs on the notebook.

Bob

 

Hi dudes I am new in this forum..

I have only a question. After installing Windows XP and formating the Windows Vista (in the N81vp), The Express Gate is going to be normal, or I have to install it again??

Greetings.

 

ExpressGate is part of the laptop BIOS - so no! I would recommend using something like Clonzilla or similar to backup the Vista partition - just in case!

Windows XP is a lot less hassle to run on the laptop then Vista (once you get the right ACHI SATA driver slip-streamed - argggg). Got my ASUS Windows 7 upgrade ordered already!! (The Windows 7 RC version runs way better than Vista.)

Bob