Headaches setting up the ASUS M51Sn

I was going to order a much lower-end Lenovo laptop that comes pre-installed with Windows XP Professional. But some decisions were made in the name of features, performance, and longevity, thus the M51Sn-A1 was chosen.

Once we opened up the box we found this new toy very appealing, nice exterior finish and awesome full-size keyboard. The specs on this thing are pretty darn good; I had no idea we were picking up a recently released model from ASUS. Too bad I won't get to test out the video card; because this M51Sn will be, strictly, a business machine. We put the battery in, plugged in the laptop, fired her up and Vista Home Premium loaded satisfactorily.

The fun ended there because our plan was to replace Vista Home Premium with Windows XP Professional. First it was difficult to get XP Pro to install. It took some time to figure out there is a setting in the BIOS under Advanced that had to be changed so that Windows XP installation CD would quit crashing with a BSOD. An IDE setting had to be switched from "Enhanced" to "Compatibility" so that OS's without native SATA support could use it. This was also causing our various methods of deleting the existing partitions to fail. That was apparently the easy part.

Installation of XP went well but when it came time to Activate XP Pro, I had no network. So I tried the Driver and Utility CD that came with the laptop; the CD says Vista Only but I tried to put it in anyway. No go, it wouldn't launch under Windows XP. So I went to the ASUS website for drivers but under the model M51Sn there are absolutely no Windows XP drivers listed for any component; just Vista drivers.

So I started looking for similar ASUS laptops, and used CPU-Z and a Linux live distro to find out more specific information about the hardware. I found the models W2P, X51L, and A6Je had a few similar components and finally discovered that the V1S and F3Sc are the most similar to the M51Sn. From the ASUS website I started downloading and testing various drivers.

Up to this point, the only drivers I have found, tested in Windows XP, and have confirmed working include:
- the Inf Update for the GM965 Express Chipset, which I downloaded from Intel's site;
- the UAA (Universal Audio Architecture) driver;
- the High Definition audio card driver;
- the Motorola phone line modem
- the 3945ABG_4965AGN WLAN Driver and Application
- the Atheros/Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet Driver

I am still missing a video card driver for the 9500M GS. The Geforce 9 series drivers i downloaded from Nvidia did not work. ASUS does not provide a Windows XP Pro version.
I have not tested any drivers for the ASUS special hotkeys, the fingerprint scanner, the swivel webcam, the bluetooth, and I don't even know if there is IR on the thing but it sure hasn't been tested yet. I doubt I will be able to get the TV antenna thing working in XP.

I think I may give up on installing Windows XP for now. Gonna have to use the Recovery DVD for Vista. I might try making this M51Sn dual boot XP/Vista.

 

You'll need to download the video card driver for laptopvideo2go.com:

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=17739

1: download the driver and extract to a folder
2: download modded inf and copy paste into the extracted driver folder to replace the inf file
3: run setup.exe.

Forgot about the the IR driver because I couldn't find the driver either, it doesn't comes with TV tuner for North America version anyway so you don't need it for remote control, besides that everything works find and here is the screenshot on similar notebook M50SV:



It's not because it's a Asus, if you pick another brand with Santa Rosa platform you are going to run into the same Headache of finding the drivers.