I bought my G1S!!!....HEEELP!!

So the transaction went through today...I sold my Dell D820 at a great price, and picked up a pretty fresh G1S at a similarly great price (about 4 weeks old).

But I've been disappointed so far. The previous owner formatted the hard disc and put in a fresh install of Windows Vista Ultimate. But it seems incredibly sluggish. I'm not sure what it is, but even as I'm typing right now, there is a considerable lag between my keystrokes and the actual appearance of the letters on the screen.

When I first got the laptop, I immediately popped in the driver disc and installed everything that was on there. When I rebooted, the system took at least 2 minutes to load, and then the computer was choppy. I tried to uninstall Norton Antivirus twice and both times the system froze. I got fed up and hard rebooted a third time to format and reinstall Vista. In the meantime, I phoned the gentleman who sold me the laptop, and he told me it may be a driver issue...that I should reinstall Vista Ultimate again (it's the only OS I have, he included the full DVD with the laptop), but instead of using the driver CD, download all of the latest drivers from Asus' website.

Now I'm stuck. Even with the fresh install of Ultimate, the laptop is still kind of sluggish - I think it may have to do with a poorer wireless reception than my D820 had...not sure...sifting through folders seems zippy, but like I said above, there is lag even as I'm typing - and I'm not sure which drivers to install. The Asus website is very confusing and lists 100 drivers under each heading, and I don't even know which to choose and how to go about installing them. It doesn't even have a specific driver for the 8600GT!

Any advice would be appreciated. I can't understand why the system is so sluggish. It's got 3gb of ram in it, on top of all the other G1S goodies!!!! Not even my 8600GT is being recognized...

Please HELP!!!!

 

P.S. With the fresh Ultimate install and NONE of the drivers except wifi, Vista gives me the following performance scores:

Processor 4.4
Memory 4.8
Graphics 1.0
Gaming Graphics 1.0
Hard Disc 4.8

 

I found this lovely thread on the G1S, outlining known issues and solutions. Interestingly, it mentions a 50% decrease in CPU power when the battery is charging via AC, which is exactly what my battery was doing when I first got the laptop and tried to uninstall Norton IS, etc. etc. I wonder if that was the cause? I'm going to run the drivers disc again, but this time, omitting a ton of the bloatware that that particular thread says isn't necessary.

 

here is a thread which has a post describing updating the driver for the gt8600...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=169712

if i were you, i would first find out which drivers work well. then do a total clean install with those very drivers. this will minimize the amount of junk you will have installed/uninstalled... (because if you reinstall and THEN go messing around with drivers and whatnot- you may install and uninstall things several times before getting things right.) norton sucks bad. don't use it. try avast, nod32, or another antivirus that is recommended in a thread on this site. i use avast and it is decent.

the g1s is a good machine. hopefully the dude you bought it from just messed it up, and his loss is your gain once you have things reinstalled.

goto this site-
http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx

select-
notebook
g1 series
g1s

this will give you a short list of drivers to choose from.

the thread link above for updating the video driver is only of use if you want to use a driver not on the asus site. the thread describes how to install a driver from laptopvideo2go.com.

if you use the video driver (under vga on the asus site once you get to the driver page) from the asus site, install it as usual for a driver.

i suggest downloading all of the drivers you will need to a usb drive. then reinstall windows. then install the drivers from the usb drive. this way if you have problems connecting to the internet you won't be stuck. install the chipset drivers first!!!

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/cs-008814.htm

good luck. let me know how you get on. be patient, this will probably take several hours to realistically get done if you are not familiar with driver installation.

 

Make sure that the video driver is installed. Vista's UI will perform badly if you are using a high resolution screen without the nVidia drivers.

I would recommend downloading the 169.04 drivers from here:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/
(For Vista 32-bit; make sure you downloaded the modded inf,too - or it will not install)

 

Hi guys,

Thanks so much for your help. I'm a bit inexperienced when it comes to this stuff, so could you help me out with a couple of things???

I went to the ASUS website and found my way to all of the latest drivers...but how do I install them? The BIOS revision, for example, is a .205 file or something. I have no idea what to do with it. I've bit poking around and heard about a specific BIOS loader for the g1s? Winflasher or something? Do I have to use that for every driver, or just for the BIOS?

 

D'oh! I Just tried installing the NVid 169.04 pack and it told me that the setup couldn't find any drivers that are compatible with my hardware...??? huh???

 

ok. so don't update the bios. you shouldn't have to do that, your computer is brand new so the bios should be ok. if you are not familiar with driver reinstallation i would not mess with the bios, because if you make a mistake- you could turn your g1s into a doorstop.

to update the video driver-
go to this thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=169712

read my post in that thread! then, follow the instructions from this link,

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=169712

EXACTLY. you will be fine. a lot of people have this exact problem, i had it too. you will get it. no worries. gotta catch some zzzzzzzz...

 

Regarding the drivers on Asus Website:

Usually they come as a Zip file that you have to extract and then you have to click on the setup file to install those.

Regarding the bios:
The safest way to flash a new BIOS is to:
1.) Create a folder c:\BIOS
2.) Move the Bios-File you want to use to this folder
3.) Restart your computer (battery and AC-adapter plugged in) and press f4
4.) Asus Bios Manager will start - select the drive and folder where the Bios is located (drive: c:\ - folder "bios")
5.) select the bios and press enter
6.) Confirm
7.) Wait until the flash process is done
8.) The laptop turns off automatically

Regarding the nVidia 169.04 dirvers:
Download the Vista 32 bit version from the laptopvideo2go. From the same thread you download the driver, you can download a file called "modded inf". Extract the drivers to a folder and then copy this modded inf into this folder replacing the original one. Now you should be able to install the driver.

 

BIOS: detailed guide in my signature.

I suggest if you reinstall anyway, use XP... and use good drivers, that 1.0 in the GPU department clearly indicates horrible drivers.

 

To install xp on a g1s with more then 2gb of ram is almost imposible for a beginer. These issues have been plaguing use for months where people buy with the base o.s. then try to put another o.s. on them only to find out that they cant or have a variety of issues. We got it all to work but now use imaging software becuase its really difficult. It has nothing to do with the bios. It has everything to do with the right drivers.
To the o.p
Do you see any processes that have a trailing 32* after them? if you do you should notice the process usually hogs up about 50% cpu. This is the result of using a wrong driver. i dont know why asus cant get it right. you would think they can come up with a better responce then "we have not approved windows 64bit for this machine" or "we have no drivers for win xp". the drivers do exist and it is possible as we do offer all the versions of vista and xp. i dont know where you went wrong but we have had our fare share of problems too. now that we store images of all of these notebooks with the various o.s. i dont really know what drivers we used.

 

i agree with ebe on the xp! xp is soooo much faster than vista. my computer boots in 30-35 sec.

 

I know how you feel. I've solved those issues on my G1S this way:

(1) Downloading every utility and driver for Vista 32-bits from Asus site;

(2) Updating everything I could with Windows Update;

(3) Installing Nvidia driver 169.04 from laptopvideo2go.com. Unfortunatly, that video driver didn't work well for F.E.A.R.. So I removed it from Device Manager and rebooted; Windows itself asked to install drivers and managed to do so with a driver from June 2007. Now it's all good.

For installing 169.04 driver, download modded INF file (at the rigth side of the download link), extract driver to a new folder, copy and rewrite INF file into the folder and run setup.

Vista really demands a lot of "horsepower". If you'd like to install XP on your G1S, reffer to Asus forum page bellow:

http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20070731141139875&board_id=3&model=G1S&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

Don't forget to download the driver pack linked there.

If you continue to use Vista, make sure you activate it as soon as possible or your system may mess up.

Holp it helps

 

Updating BIOS on G1S is quite simple. Download from Asus website an utility called Winflash and the BIOS version you want. Extract BIOS file to a new folder and run Winflash. Locate the extracted file (if you choose the zipped one, it won't work) and the program does the rest.

I upgraded to BIOS 204, as I've seen some people claiming for issues with the 205 version.

An advice: always reffer to Asus forums. There are many good advices there.

Good luck!

 

Hi guys,

I figured everything out; the laptop is running beautifully.

I took your advice, and thank you for it!

 

Great! Have fun with it

 

sweet! enjoy!

 

That's what it takes me on Ultimate....

 

That's what it takes me with XP on my 1.5yrs old computer
From hibernation... but why use shutdown anyway?

 

Hi everyone,

I reread all your posts, and thought I should use this space to ask some more questions.

1) So is it established in this community that installing XP on a G1S with 3gb of RAM is a task more suited to advanced users? I must admit, I am not 100% tech savvy.
2) As per Geared2Play's suggestion, I looked at my task manager and saw that I do indeed have a couple of ***32 applications running. Both of them are rundll32.exe.

Please recall that I'm using Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit, not 64. So maybe rundll32.exe is proper?

3) I may ask this in a seperate thread, but my G1S has some light scratches on the outer shell (behind the LCD). I'll be using a Targus backpack daily to take it to school with me, so the scratches will probably increase. Is there some kind of cream or buffing liquid I can use to polish these out???

4) Here are my new system performance specs:

1) Processor: 5.1
2) Memory: 4.7
3) Graphics: 5.9
4) Gaming Graphics: 5.5
5) Hard Disk: 4.8

Overall: 4.7

Is this a normal/good score?

I didn't update my NVidia drivers to the latest 169, since it sounds like a bit of a headache right now...may do so after I get some games

I appreciate your help, guys.

 

Vista score seems right.

1. It's not "established in the community" but if all the headaches that Geared2Play mentions are there, I indeed think it's best if you stick with Vista for now.
2.rundll32.exe is a generic Win32 process that runs a lot of stuff. It's ok to have it running AFAI can tell.

 

Thanks everyone,

Everything works great. I even updated my Nvidia drivers to 169.01

Appreciate it!

 

169.04 now...

 

After the hard time I had fighting with Vista and Asus drivers, I don't intend to "downgrade" my G1S to Windows XP. Although 205 BIOS version lets us use both OS.

My G1S scores 4.8 overall, and it came with 2 GB of RAM. Initially, it scored 4.4, then changed by itself. Don't think it's reliable.

By the way, now I'll try 169.04 driver version for Nvidia.