Unhappy W3J owner smiling now :)

I've posted multiple times about issues with the W3J on Power management and other things. Well, after reading posts of people who have done clean installs with success, I decided to take the plunge. I reinstalled the recovery disks once and nothing changed. I did a clean install of windows XP Pro from my own disc and only added drivers from the utility disk to the point that there were no ?? marks in the device manager for hardware with unknown drivers. Clean install no junk....I'm using NHC rather than P4G....

Low and behold!!! All of my problems were solved:

1. All power management issues are gone. System reverts to standby and Hibernation as it should.
2. My network card was sporadic when connecting a Cat5 cable to it for resolving network addresses...now it works perfectly.
3. I deleted the hidden partition and PRESTO, the computers' can transfer battery power from the optical battery to the main battery without shutting down in a seamless manner...
4. My mouse settings for the touchpad RETAIN the settings that I saved and do not revert back to default.
5. Lastly, the computer has some speed to it now and acts like a DUO core laptop should. It has the pep that I was expecting.

My biggest problem was #2. I was going to RMA the laptop for it. Now it's not an issue.

Hope this helps some of those guys out there that are in the same situation.

 

thats strange.. i didnt have ANY of your problems :S i guess i'm lucky

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=63851

good to hear my post above helped at least one person.

 

Yeah after installing a new drive and setting up with Asus stock recovery CD and Drivers, converting to NTFS fixed my problems.

I do think it is a bit embarassing for Asus not to have these FUNDAMENTAL issues up and running out of the box!

 

Its good to hear that things are working now for you. Although I think it would be wise to still not rule out hardware issues....given that yours is the first case I have heard of with all these issues...its likely that there is an underlying physical problem some where.....but then again it is windows and sometimes weird things happen.
good luck
let us know how things panout good or bad
a

 

I have the same problem too. MY laptop was only a few weeks old and I noticed it within the next few hours after I started the laptop.

The problem does not happen if it went into hibernate mode and a short while later you start it. It happened when you left the laptop on long enough when the hard drive went to 'sleep'.

I tried reinstalled with the XP that came with the laptop and could not solved the problem. I updated bios and drivers and could not fixed it.

How do you do a clean install? With desktop I used the A drive but with laptop I do not know how.

 

@LedZepp
Yes Led, you helped me out thanks...I was headed that direction anyway, but didn't want to do it out of pure laziness.

If you want to do a clean install you have to simply put a FULL VERSION windows XP cd in the drive and boot. After the bios post, it will ask you to hit ANY key to set up Windows XP. Just go from there. Format the drive.
Good luck
TeF

 

Hey Tef, did your W3J come with the full version Windows CDs?

 

W3J only come with a recovery CD, not any full version of Windows XP home or professional available. A product key and sticker on the machine's bottom, it still work even you have a full version Windows CD w/ sp2.

 

What is NHC???

 

Notebook Hardware Control

google it and download it :O

 

So you use this instead of P4Gear? Can you still map the profile button to use it? I like being able to switch power profiles with the press of the button

 

Profile buttons are run by HControl, and cannot be reprogrammed except through a registry hack (do a search for the thread, it's here somewhere).

You can use both NHC and P4G at the same time, but P4G is then only really good for changing the LCD brightness and standby timeouts - it doesn't seem to override the system settings you assign in NHC. You get better battery life by undervolting with NHC rather than using P4G with stock Intel voltages, but P4G was designed to be an easy and elegant, instant solution to helping with batt life (pushbutton does have that appeal ).

 

So what is the verdict here, are all of the major power management issues solved by doing a clean install? I was planning on it anyway, so it's not a big deal. My only fear is that I spend all this money to come up against annoying power management problems that even occur on a fresh Windows install. I'm happy to see that the majority of them have been taken care of, but are there any other outstanding issues?

 

Well the clean install actually fixed my DVD playback, before it stalled every 10 sec, now Asus DVD plays smoothly

 

So using the Recovery Disk fixed the DVD Playback problems? That's weird, but maybe the install image being put on the machine wasn't very mature. Also, when you converted to NTFS, what cluster size did you end up with and did you go further to fix it?